Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Joan Bryden reports on the Cons' latest abuses of majority government power, this time in allocating and shuffling around the few opposition days already available in Parliament for their own purposes. But it's worth noting the difference between the responses of the affected parties.

On the one hand, Marc Garneau's answer falls into the familiar trap of hoping that the public will rally around the Libs' sense of grievance at being mistreated by the Cons:

Liberals say government House leader Peter Van Loan told his Liberal counterpart, Marc Garneau, that the less-than-optimal timing was deliberate, payback for the Liberals using their last opposition day to hammer the government over the impact of budget cuts on food safety.

What apparently sparked Van Loan's ire was that Liberals had compared the cuts to those made by the former Conservative government of Mike Harris in Ontario, which they linked to the deadly E. coli outbreak in Walkerton. Liberals helpfully pointed out that a number of senior ministers in the Harper government were also members of the Harris cabinet, including Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.

"That 'went too far' and so wings had to be clipped," interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae wrote Friday in a blog post, recounting Van Loan's explanation for the timing of the Liberals' next opposition day.

Rae cited the incident as one of many examples that Canadians are "now living in a democracy with dictatorial tendencies."

On the other, Nathan Cullen's response paints the Cons themselves as missing the point by engaging in such petty efforts to derail debate:

"Did they give us a short day as a punishment? Whatever. You now, they're in the bubble," shrugged NDP House leader Nathan Cullen.

"They can punish away. OK. What were we trying to do? We were trying to be accountable to Canadians. So, who had a good week, who had a bad week is always the question at the end of these kinds of things."

In Cullen's opinion, "punishing us doesn't make them look strong; it makes them look weak," as though the government is afraid of open debate on its own policies.

- Leah DeVellis and Kelly McParland are both rightly appalled by Vic Toews' latest effort to vilify prison inmates - this time by attacking the already-meager income inmates are entitled to earn while incarcerated.

- Ezra Klein neatly juxtaposes how U.S. tax policy designed to disproportionately benefit the wealthy has only added to already-worrisome growth in equality.

- Meanwhile, if we're looking for examples as to how a failure to take health into account as an important social goal leads to results which everybody can agree to be disastrous, the return of whooping cough as a result of short-sighted budget cuts and anti-science hysteria surely fits the bill.

- Finally, I'm not quite sure how Thomas Friedman missed the pattern of anything and everything being up for sale for advertising purposes - and he still seems to miss the point that there's plenty of appetite to pay taxes to support the services people need. But having clued in, he serves up some well-justified concerns:

“Over the last three decades,” he states, “we have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society. A market economy is a tool — a valuable and effective tool — for organizing productive activity. But a ‘market society’ is a place where everything is up for sale. It is a way of life where market values govern every sphere of life.”

Why worry about this trend? Because, Sandel argues, market values are crowding out civic practices. When public schools are plastered with commercial advertising, they teach students to be consumers rather than citizens. When we outsource war to private military contractors, and when we have separate, shorter lines for airport security for those who can afford them, the result is that the affluent and those of modest means live increasingly separate lives, and the class-mixing institutions and public spaces that forge a sense of common experience and shared citizenship get eroded. 

...

Throughout our society, we are losing the places and institutions that used to bring people together from different walks of life. Sandel calls this the “skyboxification of American life,” and it is troubling. Unless the rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think of ourselves as engaged in a common project. At a time when to fix our society we need to do big, hard things together, the marketization of public life becomes one more thing pulling us apart. “The great missing debate in contemporary politics,” Sandel writes, “is about the role and reach of markets.” We should be asking where markets serve the public good, and where they don’t belong, he argues. And we should be asking how to rebuild class-mixing institutions. 

White elephants on parade

On the federal scene, a remarkable amount of attention and energy has been devoted to the Cons' stadium-funding talk over the past week - featuring a fair amount of cross-partisan opinion as a few actual right-wing deficit hawks point out the frivolity and futility of most of the plans.

But this looks to be the kind of issue where conservative theory conflicts most directly with how right-wing governments operate in practice for a couple of key reasons - making it seem more likely than not that the Cons will happily take the opportunity to promote their own profile at public expense.

After all, the Cons look to be entirely happy to drain Canada's public coffers as much as possible to keep resources from being put to more socially responsible uses by future governments. In that sense, the stadium projects can be seen as similar to their much-panned GST cuts and comically useless "environmental" programs, serving more to limit future federal fiscal capacity than to accomplish anything positive.

But while they'll be happy to give away public money simply so nobody else can use it, the Cons do want to get some political value for it where they can. Which makes stadium construction a natural follow-up to a stimulus program which has allowed the Cons to develop their taste for gratuitous photo ops and other publicly-funded advertising. While Harper and company obviously don't have any interest in extending the potentially useful parts of infrastructure spending, they're surely happy to put up hundreds of millions of dollars in order to take centre stage in the development of new vanity projects - particularly when their media ally Pierre Karl Péladeau figures to be one of the main beneficiaries.

Mind you, the political calculations might be different if the Cons saw any risk that their utterly undeserved managerial branding might be at risk. But any cost to the Cons figures to be minimal given that the Libs have been taking a lead role in pushing for stadium funding.

Of course, it's fair enough to point out that the Cons' irresponsibility seems to match exactly the factors which caused Canada's right-wing movement to fall apart just a couple of decades ago. But that kind of fissure may only emerge in the face of a stable government of some stripe - and by the time one turns up, we may already be stuck with an ever-expanding bill for the Cons' stadium projects.

On questionable choices

So the Libs' new Quebec decision-maker is the same candidate who managed to turn Vaudreuil-Soulanges into the Cons' best hope for a Montreal-area breakthrough with his weak performance in 2006, then underperformed his party by just barely holding serve in Westmount-Ville Marie in 2008 to get elected for the first time.

Not that Michael Ignatieff necessarily had a lot of better options. But if the NDP had removed Westmount-Ville Marie from its list of Quebec targets before, the prospect of a distracted Garneau would seem to offer reason to take another strong run at the seat. And there may plenty more opportunities elsewhere as well (for the NDP as well as for the Libs' other competitors) unless Garneau somehow proves more proficient handling Quebec as a whole than he has been in winning support for his own personal campaigns.

Update: Line of the day from Rob Cottingham via Scott Piatkowski:

Ignatieff picks Marc Garneau as his top guy in Quebec. Experience working in freefall may come in handy.

Credit where due

Others have already mentioned the Libs' declaration of support for the principle of net neutrality - and I'll join in giving them full credit for taking a surprising stand on the right side of the issue. But while most of the discussion so far has focused on trying to push the Cons to do the same as the party who holds power, it's worth noting that there's also another available way to enshrine net neutrality in law.

NDP MP Charlie Angus' private members' bill has only passed the first reading stage so far, but looks to have far more chance of making progress with the Libs onside. Which means that even if the Cons continue to ignore the dangers of allowing ISPs to throttle the content available to Internet users, there's still an opportunity to keep Canada's online presence strong and free.