Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Paul Taylor comments on the rifts in our social fabric which are being highlighted by COVID-19. And Graham Riches argues that the food banks which are being pushed to the limit by the pandemic would never have been necessary if our economy wasn't fundamentally broken to begin with.

- George Packer writes that the coronavirus pandemic is only exposing the U.S. as a thoroughly failed state. And Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe discuss how after wasting ample opportunity to prepare the U.S. and minimize the damage from the first wave of the virus, Donald Trump is now looking to make matters far worse with his inability to resist pushing for a hasty relaxation of the rules protecting the public.

- Trish Hennessy suggests that social prescribing may offer a helpful model in remediating the damage COVID-19 has done.

- Arwa Mahdawi notes that it's the wealthiest few who have contributed the least who have lined up for the largest bailout demands. Jayati Ghosh notes that less-developed countries are facing far more difficult circumstances than we are. And Kate Aronoff writes that rather than offering any meaningful help, our global institutions have been set up to push developing countries to fail. 

- Finally, Betsy Donald and Shauna Brail point out how the disruption of supply chains for vital goods has signaled the need to rebuild Canada's manufacturing sector.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Mark Rowlinson points out how the obvious frailty of our current supply chains highlights the need to develop Canadian manufacturing. And Amanda Follett Hosgood notes the importance of localized food production in particular.

- Bill McKibben calls out the oil industry's attempts to use COVID-19 as an excuse to push through pipeline construction, while Mia Rabson exposes its intensive lobbying to undermine any action on climate change or environmental protection.

- Meanwhile, Rhiana Gunn-Wright offers a reminder that the climate change crisis is no less severe in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. And Brian Kahn reports that the group which worked on Jay Inslee's climate plan has developed a roadmap to ensure that the coronavirus recovery results in a just transition toward cleaner energy.

- Bruce Anderson discusses how the effort to achieve physical distancing has ultimately brought people closer together in a common mission. And the Globe and Mail's editorial board recognizes that the social cohesion needed to overcome the coronavirus shouldn't be used as an excuse for governments to claim extraordinary and unaccountable powers.

- Marc Lee argues that the higher levels of government need to provide immediate supports to local governments and regional authorities which were struggling under the weight of downloaded responsibilities and slashed funding even before the pandemic. 

- Finally, Simon Kuper writes about Thomas Piketty's call for wealth taxes to rectify gross inequality - a cause which is only becoming more important as the world's wealthiest few rake in billions of dollars more while the rest of the world is locked down.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Brent Patterson points out the continued dangers of extrajudicial challenges to laws under the CETA. And John Jacobs examines (PDF) the likelihood that reduced tariffs under the Trans-Pacific Partnership would mostly push Canada toward further dependence on resource extraction.

- Ken Jacobs, Zohar Perla, Ian Perry and Dave Graham-Squire study the declining wages being paid to workers in the U.S.' manufacturing sector, along with the public costs of that drop. And Paul Sonn and Yannet Lathrop note that there's no reason to view lower wages as doing anything to influence the number of jobs available.

- CBC reports on new research into the connection between unemployment, economic insecurity and cancer deaths. And Emma Rumney discusses the OECD's conclusion that inequality leads to stagnating productivity and economic development.

- Stephen Hume notes that British Columbia's provincial clawbacks are essentially designed to force people with disabilities to live in poverty. And Travis Lupick reports that Vancouver's count of homeless people is at a ten-year high.

- Finally, Sophia Reuss discusses the need to hear from migrant workers in evaluating Canada's temporary foreign worker program - not only from the employers who seek to exploit them.

New column day

Here, taking a look at the voter pools the NDP will be looking to win over in order to come out ahead in if this fall's federal election turns into a two-party race. And I'll note that while Alberta may serve as the most recent precedent, similar patterns can be found in the NDP's previous rises to power in other provinces.

For further reading...
- Both Nanos and EKOS have polled as to the federal parties' accessible and second-choice support, with the NDP currently leading the pack on both fronts.
- And for more about the business groups who have reason to want to see a change from the Cons, Dean Beeby discusses the problems facing Canada's manufacturing sector. Daniel Tencer reported on tech industry opposition to Bill C-51. And Karen Briere reports on how the Trans-Pacific Partnership is creating uncertainty in supply-managed agricultural sectors, while Michael Geist highlighted some of the other obvious costs of the deal.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman look into the spread of wealth inequality in the U.S., and find that it may be worse than we already knew. And Paul Krugman discusses how toxic anti-government ideology is preventing the U.S. from both getting its economy on track in the short term, and investing in infrastructure it will need down the road:

More than seven years have passed since the housing bubble burst, and ever since, America has been awash in savings — or more accurately, desired savings — with nowhere to go. Borrowing to buy homes has recovered a bit, but remains low. Corporations are earning huge profits, but are reluctant to invest in the face of weak consumer demand, so they’re accumulating cash or buying back their own stock. Banks are holding almost $2.7 trillion in excess reserves — funds they could lend out, but choose instead to leave idle.

And the mismatch between desired saving and the willingness to invest has kept the economy depressed. Remember, your spending is my income and my spending is your income, so if everyone tries to spend less at the same time, everyone’s income falls.

There’s an obvious policy response to this situation: public investment. We have huge infrastructure needs, especially in water and transportation, and the federal government can borrow incredibly cheaply — in fact, interest rates on inflation-protected bonds have been negative much of the time (they’re currently just 0.4 percent). So borrowing to build roads, repair sewers and more seems like a no-brainer.
...
(T)he result...is that America has turned its back on its own history. We need public investment; at a time of very low interest rates, we could easily afford it. But build we won’t.

- Meanwhile, PressProgress highlights the Bank of Canada's alarming findings about the decay of Canada's manufacturing sector. And Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood finds that big oil's massive profits aren't producing anywhere near enough jobs to pick up the slack.

- Planet Experts reports on the UN's latest report which concludes that climate change is causing irreversible damage to our planet. But presumably the oil industry will simply pretend that inconvenient facts don't exist - as it typically does when people out the other ill environmental effects of resource exploitation.

- Colin Macleod weighs in on the ongoing child care debate with a strong case for a universal program rather than selective incentives and subsidies:

First, means testing, if it is to be fair and reasonably accurate, requires the creation of elaborate and expensive bureaucratic procedures through which eligible recipients can be distinguished from ineligible recipients. In practice, such systems are highly inefficient and frequently fail to correctly those who deserve assistance from those who do not. It is simpler and more efficient to provide the opportunity for cheap daycare available to all on an equal basis.

Second, means-testing draws invidious distinctions between citizens that jeopardize the social conditions of self-respect. In a society in which the default assumption is that citizens should bear the full cost of daycare costs, demonstrating that someone merits a subsidy often requires them to make ‘shameful revelations’. The fat cats do not have to worry about that. They are not in a position of being scrutinized by a government bureaucrat in order to determine whether they are worthy recipients of something to which all parents should have ready access to: good childcare.

I suspect that most of the people who are enthusiastic about means testing are those who are never likely to be subject to it. The rich might feel differently about means testing if say their health care cards were revoked upon determination that their income fell within the top 15% of earners and that in order to gain access to publicly provided health care they would have to complete a series of confusing forms and meet with an entitlements officer who would ask probing questions about whether they really needed to access the public system. It’s ironic that many right-wingers who are generally suspicious of the state think it’s ok to subject some citizens – usually the poor – to invasive inquiries of this sort by state officials.

Instead of treating access to affordable daycare as something that distinguishes the poor from the rich, we should treat it as an opportunity to which all have access in virtue of our common and equal citizenship. On this model, the appropriate way to ensure that the costs of providing the common good of access to daycare are fairly shared is through the background tax system. Those who worry about the regressive potential of daycare tend to neglect the overall malleability of the tax system. A properly structured arrangement for funding daycare through the tax system need not confer net benefits on the rich of the sort critics worry about. If the system for funding is made suitably fair then the concern that the rich are unfairly benefiting from a subsidy is adequately answered. Universality need not be regressive and we can have progressivity without means testing.

- Finally, Elizabeth Renzetti argues that we should take a hard line against fearmongering in light of last week's shootings in Ottawa, while Eric Wright criticizes Stephen Harper for instead looking to foment unjustified conflict.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Jacob Chamberlain discusses the all-too-familiar pattern of corporate insiders using their wealth and influence to try to attack basic social supports for less-privileged citizens:

CEOs from America's largest corporations—including its biggest banks, retailers, and insurance companies who helped drive the country into the worst recession in nearly a century— are now calling on Congress to punish the nation's working class and society's most vulnerable by advocating major changes to Social Security and Medicare in a new lobbying push that critics say reveal the cruelty and selfish nature of the country's corporate class. 

The Business Roundtable, comprised of more than 200 chief executives and some of the nation's wealthiest individuals, began lobbying DC lawmakers Wednesday in a press conference calling for major cuts to Social Security (including a raise in elgibility age to 70) and a new push to privatize Medicare.
 ...
Among the other 200 corporations, Roundtable members include American Express, AT&T, Bank of America, Bayer, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, Dow Chemical Company, and JPMorgan.

"Average CEO pay for S&P 500 companies is nearly $13 million," Garofalo adds. "Recent increases in life expectancy have only benefited wealthier workers in non-physical jobs. Poorer workers doing physical labor have not seen the same gains and would be most hurt by an increase in the retirement age."

- Meanwhile, the Harper Cons are using public money to make sure that Canada's equivalent business barons are able to jet-set around the globe in pursuit of their own profits.

- But while far too many Canadian governments have bought into the divine right of corporate leaders, the courts aren't quite so deferential - as evidenced by the ruling that HD Mining isn't entitled to escape scrutiny for its decade-plus "temporary" worker permits granted without any meaningful review.

- Andrew Jackson rebuts the claim that the erosion of Canadian manufacturing as anything but a sub-contractor to the tar sands is either inevitable or desirable:

In fact, there has been a huge divergence in the fortunes of Canadian and U.S. manufacturers over the past decade. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, if 2002 is set as the base year, U.S. manufacturing output grew by 23.2 per cent by 2011, while shrinking by 11.5 per cent in Canada.

The same data base shows that Canada experienced a massive loss of cost competitiveness compared to U.S. manufacturers. Canadian unit labour costs rose by 79.1 per cent on a U.S. dollar basis from 2002 to 2011, compared to a fall of 14.3 per cent in the U.S.

Most of this huge loss in cost competitiveness was due to the appreciation of the exchange rate. However, lagging productivity is also an important part of the story. Between 2002 and 2011, hourly productivity in manufacturing grew by a stunning 55.7 per cent in the U.S. compared to an abysmal 10.6 per cent in Canada.

To summarize, U.S. manufacturing output and productivity have both grown strongly since 2002, while output has shrunk in Canada and productivity has barely improved.

This picture is not one of successful restructuring. Rather the dismal state of Canadian manufacturing is the result of an over-valued exchange rate combined with the impacts of a structural regression to relatively low value-added resource extraction and processing.

- Finally, Pete McMartin rightly slams the closed-door nature of what are supposed to be public hearings into the Northern Gateway pipeline.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Sum Of Us deserves plenty of credit for highlighting Enbridge's attempt to delete a thousand square kilometers of treacherous and sensitive islands in order to sugar-coat the dangers of shipping oil out of Kitimat. But it's also worth noting that the issue goes beyond the precise site chosen as the first and cheapest option: as Enbridge itself has claimed in its attempt to assuage people who stand to be affected by the pipeline inland, there's far more risk involved in shipping oil products by tanker than by pipeline wherever they choose to place the port. And that means the greater outrage is the Cons' utter negligence in doing everything they can to encourage tanker traffic.

- Meanwhile, John O'Connor points out the difference between the Cons' refusal to study or regulate  the genuine dangers of reckless oil production and use, and their determination to find fault with cleaner and safer wind power alternatives.

- Erin catches Don Morgan in a whopper of a lie about the state of Saskatchewan manufacturing since his government took power:

Saskatchewan newspapers report:

“Certainly in professional, scientific and technical areas and in the mining and the manufacturing sector (the job numbers) are very strong,” Don Morgan, minister of advanced education and labour relations, told reporters at news conference Friday.

On Friday, Statistics Canada reported that Saskatchewan manufacturing employment dropped by 900 last month and declined by 600 over the past year. Since Morgan’s Sask. Party government took office, our province has lost 5,100 manufacturing jobs. By what measure is manufacturing employment “very strong”?

...

It’s easy to understand why Sask. Party politicians would like to claim strong manufacturing employment. They are trying to characterize “Dutch disease” as an eastern Canadian preoccupation. In reality, manufacturing job losses have afflicted all regions of Canada, including Saskatchewan.

- Finally, Bill Curry reports on the radical anti-worker advice that looks to form the basis for the Cons' next budget. But it's worth noting that even the Cons' corporate allies are using inequality language as both a goal and an excuse to attack labour just as brutally as their Republican counterparts:

Labour issues surface in several discussion categories, with the general view that Canadian workers are overpriced. “Need to address wage differentials in labor market among countries; we are losing jobs to other countries,” the memo reads. “Right to Work legislation should be pondered as it creates inequities in productivity; US example was provided.”

In the United States, about two dozen state governments have passed right-to-work legislation, which allows workers to opt out of paying union dues. Critics call the measures a form of union busting.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Lana Payne sees reason for hope in the sheer breadth of citizens who are protesting against the Harper Cons:

Scientists. Doctors. Nuclear engineers. Academics. Researchers. Stephen Harper has a big problem.

He has ticked them all off. And they are not suffering their grievances or concerns for informed, fact-based public policy and decision-making, the environment, the health of Canada’s most vulnerable citizens and the safety of all of us in silence.

No. Instead they are protesting, marching, disrupting government news conferences. They are mobilizing.
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(T)his is a prime minister and a government who have mobilized Canadians to take action, to protest, march and speak out. Canadians who would not normally do so. Canadians who care about the country, who care about how we treat the most vulnerable among us: the poor, the elderly. Who care about facts.
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(T)he provinces have power. The premiers just need to figure out how they want to use it and whether they can agree among themselves how best to do so. This won’t be easy, but it is not impossible.

It will require courage and leadership and an understanding that Canada is truly great when we are more than the sum of our parts.

It’s time for the premiers to start fighting back. And when they do, Canadians, the vast majority of us, will be with them.

- But then, we can't assume that all provinces are particularly interested in hearing about the needs of Canada's most vulnerable citizens either - as sadly demonstrated by the Sask Party's decision to de-fund Equal Justice For All.

- Fortunately, at least some others are picking up the slack in documenting how people are affected by uncaring decision-makers. For example, Rob Rainer and Linda Silas discuss how inequality is making Canada sick.

- And the CAW looks into the job market facing laid-off manufacturing-sector workers, and finds that there's plenty of reason for concern:

A groundbreaking study tracking a group of laid off workers in Ontario shows that they continue to struggle to find decent jobs amidst the turmoil of the current labour market.

The final phase of the CAW's Worker Adjustment Tracking Study released earlier today shows that many laid off workers are forced into lower quality and more precarious jobs (including temp agency work), with a significant reduction in pay following the loss of good full-time employment.
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Other study highlights include:
- Over 1 in 5 reported being without income for longer than one year;
- 31% reported their general health has deteriorated as a result of layoff;
- 48% reported they had done without something they needed in order to pay the rent or mortgage;
- Employment and job characteristics for most workers are poorer than in their previous jobs;
- Nearly 60% of those who completed job retraining programs found related employment.

 - Finally, Craig McInnes is the latest to weigh in on how Enbridge's utter irresponsibility in causing its Michigan spill should make us wary of its intentions in ramming through a Gateway pipeline.

On trade-offs

Much of the recent discussion as to how to develop a strong and sustainable Canadian economy has included absolutely no challenge to the theory that natural resource development is somehow a driver of increased jobs. So let's take a closer look at the relative economic contributions of the natural resource sector which the Cons are so determined to prioritize above all others, and the manufacturing sector that's suffering as a result.

Here are Statistics Canada's total job numbers by industry for 2011 - which lump together "Forestry, fishing, mining, quarrying, oil and gas" into a single unit employing a grand total of 337,200 people. And even oil industry spinmeisters say the great promise arising from a free-for-all in unfettered oil sands growth is "tens of thousands" of jobs over the next couple of decades, signalling that there's no great jobs boom to be had by placing further emphasis on the sector.

By way of comparison, Statistics Canada shows that manufacturers provided 1,760,200 jobs across Canada - five times the amount provided by the entire resource sector. And there are plenty of those that stand to be lost to high resource prices: in fact the study so often cited as showing merely a "mild" case of Dutch Disease so far also points to a loss of 200,000 jobs already, with plenty more to come as the Cons push even further toward emphasizing resource extraction.

And in case there's any doubt, the massive net loss of jobs caused by focusing on resource development at the expense of manufacturing won't be made up for by higher wages. Yes, resource-sector jobs pay somewhat more than their manufacturing-sector counterparts - but the difference is on a scale of substantially less than 2-to-1, in contrast to the 5-to-1 ratio in present-day jobs and seemingly similar scale of job effects as our dollar's value is further influenced by resource extraction.

So the Cons' emphasis on resource extraction is just another aspect of their consistent goal of making sure that Canadian workers see as little benefit as possible from our country's economic activity. And citizens from all regions of Canada should be able to see how damaging that is to everybody but the Cons' corporate benefactors.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Jim Stanford sets the record straight as to how Canada's manufacturing sector has eroded over the past couple of decades:

(T)echnology can explain some of the job loss, but not most of it. It certainly cannot explain the disproportionate carnage in Canadian manufacturing, nor the all-out industrial warfare which now characterizes much of the sector (like the management lockouts at Caterpillar and Rio Tinto). The loss of 500,000 manufacturing jobs in Canada over the last decade was far more dramatic than most jurisdictions. Many factors contributed to this miserable record, including lopsided trading relationships, the volatile trajectory of Canada’s currency, and the unprecedented aggression with which business executives now do anything that boosts profit margins, without regard to community welfare.

Technological change applies to all manufacturing jurisdictions, so there should be no secular trend in Canada’s share of total manufacturing production. However, contrary to Moffatt’s assertion, our relative share of global manufacturing has indeed declined dramatically. As recently as 2001, Canada was broadly self-sufficient in manufacturing. Huge volumes of two-way trade entered and left, but at the bottom line we exported as much as we imported (about $300 billion each way). By 2011, however, this balanced position disintegrated into a massive manufacturing deficit of almost $100 billion, which explains 300,000 of the jobs lost since 2001.
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Moffatt’s faith that technological growth makes everyone better off is unjustified by recent history. Lopsided globalization, and the aggressive actions of business leaders, have severed the traditional link between productivity and mass prosperity. That’s why real wages in Canada are no higher today than a quarter-century ago, despite a 35-per-cent increase in labour productivity in the same time. And that’s why Caterpillar executives (who receive salaries worth tens of millions of dollars) feel entitled to demand enormous rollbacks from highly skilled Canadian workers, on pain of total disinvestment.

 And Stanford also points out the issue is hardly a new one.

- Pat Atkinson wonders why the concept of "family values" doesn't extend to immigrants - who are now being told by federal and provincial governments alike to choose between Canadian work and their families.

- Jim Hightower discusses how big-money pharmaceutical ad campaigns have turned U.S. health care into a profit driver rather than a system to actually improve health outcomes.

- Finally, Alison and Saskboy offer updates on Robocon. And Jonathan Montpetit opens up public reporting on a brand new Con scandal - with the party's top Quebec organizer openly musing about how corporate interests might be able to buy off political inasiders.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Jim Stanford points out that when it comes to manufacturing, any talk of an "invisible hand" doing much for productivity is based purely on faith rather than evidence:

When it comes to Canada’s lousy record in productivity and innovation, the standard prescription of economists is both clear and predictable. They believe unregulated markets are the best way to allocate resources and determine the composition of output. Therefore, to improve efficiency and innovation, simply improve markets: Eliminate “distorting” taxes. Eliminate regulations. Sign more free-trade agreements. Cut “red tape.” That will unleash the full potential of the private sector to innovate and optimize, and Canada will become a northern tiger.

Canadian economic and social policy has been generally following this advice for a quarter-century. Taxes are lower, globalization is embraced, labour markets are unforgiving, business is freer (and more profitable) than any time in our history. Ironically, however, the more vigorously we pursue the holy grail of self-adjusting markets, the worse our productivity and innovation has been.
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This seeming contradiction between Canada’s business-friendly policy environment and the failure of the resulting empowered private sector to deliver innovation and productivity growth puzzles economists who advocate market-driven approaches. They search for some remaining imperfections or residual market impediments to explain the failure of Canadian productivity and innovation to take off.

But what if the starting assumption of their model – namely, that unconstrained private market forces always produce the most efficient, innovative economy – is not justified? What if, in fact, markets work more productively and creatively when they are guided, supported, and constrained, rather than simply being unleashed? What if the best approach is to challenge and direct markets to more productive and innovative outcomes?

International experience reinforces my skepticism of market-driven policy. The successful state-led industrialization experience of several Asian and Latin American economies in recent decades, where policy was proactive and interventionist, suggests that innovative, productivity-enhancing growth does not occur spontaneously as a result of market forces. Instead, the “visible hand” of government intervention, manifested in a wide range of forms, is more strongly associated with qualitative and quantitative economic progress. Targeted subsidies, strategic trade interventions, active industrial strategies in high-tech industries, domestic procurement strategies, and even public ownership of key firms have all been more effective in promoting innovation and export success than Canada’s hands-off approach.

- And speaking of evidence, interim Auditor General found none that the Cons cared in the slightest whether their stimulus spending saved any jobs other than their own.

- Meanwhile, Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault has pointed out that the Cons' move to destroy the data supporting the long gun registry makes for a disturbing precedent. But I have to wonder whether as secretive a government as Stephen Harper's will see that precedent as a feature rather than a bug: what better way to cover its tracks for future misdeeds than to make the disappearance of information into standard operating procedure?

- Finally, while engaging in a bit more "they all do it" than seems justified, John Ivison rightly slams the Cons' contempt for Parliament.

On manufactured claims

I wasn't sure if there were any claims about the HST left to be debunked before the tax hike on consumers officially takes effect. But Erin has found at least one more, pointing out that Ontario's attempts to sell the tax as a boon to manufacturers fly in the face of reality:

Advocates of the Harmonized Sales Tax often suggest that it will support Ontario’s beleaguered manufacturing sector. They emphasize that the current Provincial Sales Tax applies not only to finished products purchased by consumers, but also to some inputs purchased by businesses. As one business sells components to another, sales tax could be paid repeatedly along the supply chain.
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I have always been sceptical of this claim because the existing sales tax already exempts almost all of the machinery and equipment used in manufacturing. Ontario’s Tax Plan for Jobs and Growth, a fascinating (if obnoxiously titled) document released by the provincial government late last year, confirms my scepticism.

Table 2 indicates that, when fully implemented, the input tax credits will give $4.5 billion per year to businesses. Manufacturers will receive $510 million, 11% of the total.

By comparison, the most recent Statistics Canada figures indicate that manufacturing accounted for 17% of Ontario’s Gross Domestic Product in 2008. So, the Harmonized Sales Tax will provide disproportionately little benefit to manufacturing.

On trade-offs

Environmental Defence makes a great point about the consequences of the Cons' attempt to pretend that what's good for tar sands operators must be good for the rest of the country:

A recent study by a University of Ottawa professor and others estimates that 42 per cent of the job loss in Canadian manufacturing over the last few years resulting from the rise in the dollar can be attributed to our rise in oil exports, and identifies the computer and electronics, textile, transportation, machinery, paper and plastics sectors as those most affected. Ontario and Quebec are home to the majority of these industries.

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, Jeff Rubin, former chief economist for CIBC World Markets, Frank Stronach, chairman of Magna, and many others have pointed to the damaging impact that a high Canadian dollar has on the manufacturing sector. The Ontario government estimates that a sustained five-cent change in the dollar has a $6 billion impact on the Ontario economy.

Instead of being Canada's economic engine, the tar sands could actually prevent many regions from recovering from the recession as oil prices continue their relentless upward march due to global scarcity.

Sadly, there hasn't been anywhere near enough pushback yet against the Harper line that the rest of the country should be glad to have a government that puts the tar sands first.

But there's every opportunity to make the case that the actual public policy tradeoff isn't between the environment and jobs but between dirty, one-time resource extraction and cleaner, more sustainable manufacturing. And the more that choice is presented to Canadians, the better the chances that we'll be able to orient our economy toward the latter rather than accepting the argument that the oil industry should be able to buy our silence.

Same old story, manufacturing edition

Shorter Lib manufacturing fund proposal:
And to Stephen Harper, we say that your seven cents of industrial investment for every dollar of corporate tax cuts doesn't go too far enough!

On problem-solving

There's plenty of frustration among Canadian workers with the continued crisis in the manufacturing sector, as evidenced by a series of well-attended protests this weekend. But only one federal leader appears to both recognize the problem and have some idea how to fix it - and the London Free Press covered Jack Layton's prescription for Canadian manufacturing:

Job cuts in the manufacturing industry won't be stopped unless the federal government does more to push for fair trade and production of green products, NDP Leader Jack Layton said last night at a stop in London...

The federal government must enact strategies to ensure Canadian products are traded fairly on an international market, he said.

"If Korea wants to sell cars here, they need to take ours."

A push toward producing environmentally friendly products is also needed to keep jobs here, Layton said.

"We need a green car strategy," the federal NDP leader said.

Of course, there's plenty more to be said about the issue than the Free Press covered. And indeed, the NDP has largely said it before.

But it's still important to highlight the gap between merely recognizing a problem, and actually having some solution to offer. And the more clear it becomes that the NDP stands out in the latter category, the better the chances of the NDP's proposals actually becoming public policy.