Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Polly Toynbee looks at how the UK is now treating children in need as investment opportunities to be exploited by investors, rather than people to be assisted. And Mark Taliano writes that privatization is a problem rather than a solution when it comes to providing public services.

- Geoff Leo uncovers still more stories about the abuse of temporary foreign workers. And David Climenhaga looks behind the business lobby's insistence on being granted a low-wage, no-rights pool of disposable foreign labour to replace Canadians who may expect to have lives outside of work rather than devoting their every moment and thought to serving a corporate master:

(W)hen they feel comfortable enough to slip outside their message box, a great many of them disparage their fellow Canadians, especially the young people who traditionally fill food service jobs in this country, because Canadian workers sometimes stand up for their rights and demand fair treatment.

Consider this unguarded commentary by a restaurant owner in my community, St. Albert, Alberta, sympathetically reported by the local bi-weekly.

"After years of struggling to retain full-time staff," the paper's reporter wrote, the local fast-food restaurant operator "resorted to hiring two foreign workers…" The reason, the reporter uncritically explained, was that the restaurateur found Canadian employees didn't show up for work, "showed a lack of commitment" or -- quelle horreur! -- wanted to change their schedules.
...
(T)alking points notwithstanding, the alleged labour shortage, the claimed skills shortage, the purported high cost of foreign workers and the desire to protect Canadian jobs aren't any of them the real issue -- it's the attitude of Canadian employees.

And remember, the Canadian employees were talking about are people like our own children!

This is a dirty little secret of many small businesses in communities all over Canada. All the government, Chamber of Commerce and trade association talking points in the world can't disguise it: The reason so many Canadian fast food employers love temporary foreign workers is not because Canadians are lousy workers, and certainly not because there's a genuine shortage of Canadians who could do the work, but because TFWs have no rights and are easy to exploit.

Uppity Canadians too readily stand up for their rights.

 - Meanwhile, Jacqueline Nelson reports on the latest protests among fast food workers (this time spanning the globe).

- Rick Salutin rightly slams Tim Hudak's fear-based economic policy. And Josh Mandryk offers some reason for hope in making the case for a stronger fair wage policy on government contracts.

- Finally, Seumas Milne looks at the state of European politics and concludes that a strong populist movement on the left is needed not only for its own sake, but also to ensure that genuine frustrations about the status quo can find some other outlet besides the prejudice and xenophobia of the far right:

(T)he council of ministers and commission will go on calling the shots in cahoots with the corporate interests that wield the real power at the heart of the EU. It is the ever-growing grip of banks and corporations on the Brussels machinery – reflected in the 30,000 lobbyists who feed off its work – that has shaped each new regulation, commission proposal and court ruling.

The result is a system that has given a failed economic model the force of treaty, entrenching deregulation and privatisation while corporate power is privileged over employment and social rights. It's an approach being played out in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership deal being negotiated between the EU and US – that would allow companies to bypass the courts to enforce business-drafted regulations over elected public authorities.

The result has been an erosion of the modest social protections built into the single market: growing restrictions on public intervention and investment in the name of competition, and the exploitation of migrant workers to undercut existing employees in the name of free movement of services.
...
So long as Europe's establishment remains locked in this Brussels orthodoxy, the only antidote to the growth of the far right is a populism of the left: one that targets class and corporate power instead of foreigners. In different ways, that has been the approach of Syriza, now leading the polls in Greece, and the Dutch Socialist party, expected to overtake Labour for the first time. Without it the rise of the racists and xenophobes will go on.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Alex Himelfarb and Jordan Himelfarb comment on the dangers of failing to talk about taxes:

The tax debate is often muddied by disagreement about whether taxes have actually gone up or down. As the economy grows, so too do tax revenues and spending, which is why many (though not all) prefer to measure tax as a percentage of the economy (GDP). The only good data on this come from StatsCan in a survey discontinued in 2008. These numbers show a decline in the scale of tax and spending over the last several decades, as do international comparisons. And using the federal government’s own projections, the scale of federal tax and spending will, over the next years, fall to lows not seen for seven decades.

Whether we’re taxed too much or too little is a perennial debate that now needs rebalancing. It’s all well and good to say that many Canadians want smaller government but that means nothing unless it’s based on some understanding of how this will affect our ability to pursue our shared goals. We ought to know what we’re giving up before we celebrate the next round of tax cuts.

It’s time we restored the tax debate to its rightful place within a larger conversation, which has all but vanished, about the kind of country we want and are willing to pay for.

- Marc Taliano writes that rather than solving any problems arising out of limited public resources, privatization only exacerbates the problem of public dollars being diverted to corporate purposes. And Paul Krugman notes that Cliven Bundy represents a perfect example of an anti-social businessman portraying himself as an individualist while blatantly stealing public resources.

- Marc Zwelling points out the challenge facing progressive voices in discussing poverty, as the general public is willing to respond to the issue when prompted while having little history of considering it as a top-of-mind concern.

- Lawrence Martin responds to the commentators who have tried to treat the failed Elections Canada investigation into Robocon as a retroactive basis to question whether electoral fraud should have been covered in the media. And Michael Harris sees Robocon as the sign of a democracy in decay based on the near-impossibility of holding fraudsters accountable:

What Yves Cote’s report really means is that not all elements of an offence under the Elections Act as written could be established. A big part of the reason for that is the weak investigative powers of the Commissioner rather than a shortage of skullduggery.

It really comes down to the fact that the Elections Canada Act is like a worn out pair of your grannie’s lace-ups. The commissioner can’t compel evidence, and persons of interest can decline to be interviewed by EC investigators. Cote noted that “In one instance, a person who investigators believed could have provided very relevant information declined to be interviewed.”

Many others in this investigation did the same thing. And apparently there is no such thing as attempted voter suppression. Unless a voter is actually prevented from voting, there is no offence. And that’s not all. If incorrect poll information is given out and a citizen wants to pursue a complaint it is “not sufficient to simply prove the content of the call and the identity of the caller.” It is also necessary to prove the call was made with the intention of preventing an elector from voting. The burden of proof, “is the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Believe it or not, the same burden of proof applies to harassing calls: “To transmit false or mistaken information without the requisite intent, however objectionable it may be, is not, in itself, an offence under the Act,” Cote reports.

Think about that for a moment. Without the element of mens rea or guilty mind, a rogue robocaller is not breaking the law merely by misdirecting voters to the wrong poll. In order for an offence to take place, there are two additional requirements. The voter must prove as a result of the call, he didn’t vote; and investigators have to be satisfied that the robocaller intended his misinformation to stop the person from voting.

You see why the jails will not soon be filled with cheating robocallers. Why else would a robocaller send a person to the wrong poll — to introduce him to a part of town he’s never seen before?

- Finally, Susan Delacourt nicely highlights what a tax return would look like if delivered in the same form as one of the Cons' spin-heavy, fact-free budgets.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Pat Atkinson discusses the importance of unions in ensuring a fair deal for all workers:

It's because of unions and their tenacious advocacy on behalf of their members that workers not only in this province but also in other jurisdictions enjoy legislated workplace benefits gained through negotiation: the 40-hour work week, the eight-hour work day, equal pay for equal work for women, occupational health and safety, paid vacations, overtime pay and more.

These laws did not come easily. We now take many of these workplace rights for granted, but should we?
...
If the government wants to end union contributions to political parties, to be fair it should ban all corporate contributions as well. If unions want to spend their revenues to promote issues such as affordable housing, equal pay for work of equal value and human rights and to oppose certain government policies, that's up to them.

As for the rest of what elected union officials do on behalf of their members, that decision is for the membership to make, not the government.

- Meanwhile, David Pugliese highlights the costs of the right-wing obsession with taking jobs away from public-sector workers - as the federal Cons, having laid off management and maintenance workers with the Department of National Defence, are now set to pay a nine-figure price to the private sector to perform exactly the same services.

- Sixth Estate notes that the Cons aren't any more trustworthy when it comes to their decision to strip immigrants of citizenship based on a presumption of fraud without even bothering to evaluate their circumstances.

- And finally, Mark Taliano contrasts the fair, generous and cooperative Canada which most of us value as a national identity against the Cons' limited focus on exploiting the country's resources for the benefit of those with the most wealth and power to start with.