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.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Barbara Yaffe lets Hugh Segal make the case for a guaranteed annual income to end poverty in Canada:

(Hugh Segal) says it could be arranged by way of a tax credit through the income tax system, to top up income of anyone falling below Statistics Canada’s Low Income Cutoff (LICO).

LICO for a single person is about $22,200; for a family with three children, roughly $47,000.

“In other words,” writes Segal, “being poor would become a problem we all buffered in the same way as we buffer all Canadians relative to health care.”

He estimates the annual cost at about $10,000 per person.

But when all the billions now spent on health care and heavily stigmatized welfare payments — to alternatively address needs of the poor — are subtracted, the net cost to government would be zero.

“The cost to our Canadian economy of poor Canadians dropping out of school, getting sick faster, staying in hospital longer and living shorter lives than the rest of us is in the billions.”
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Cost savings to governments would indeed be real, according to a study cited by Segal, carried out by University of Manitoba health sciences professor Evelyn Forget.

Forget tracked an 8.5-per-cent drop in hospital visits among a sample group of farm families in Dauphin, Man., who were part of a 1970s-era federal experiment guaranteeing minimum incomes in case of crop failures.

That experiment also rendered invalid a notion that guaranteed incomes prompt recipients to quit work to become couch potatoes.

“The efficient and humane thing to do is to take the example of Dauphin and learn from it,” writes Segal, noting Ottawa wouldn’t need a new bureaucracy to deliver guaranteed incomes.

“We have the (tax) system in place.”

 - Meanwhile, Alex Himelfarb proposes that we measure our actions as a society by how we treat those who have the least:

International agencies and a number of countries are developing indices that take into account equality, sustainability, democracy and trust, as well as economic performance. In Canada, Roy Romanow has proposed just such an index, and recently David Suzuki added his voice to the campaign to think beyond GDP — promoting a measure of General National Happiness with a central place for the health of the environment, which enables all else. These are welcome initiatives because they ask us to consider what is important, what our future ought to look like.

To this work I would propose the addition of another measure, which despite its long pedigree is too easily overlooked. Gandhi and Pope John Paul II, Aristotle and John Rawls, and artists through the ages have all reminded us that the real test of any society is how we treat the weakest among us. Here too, with glaring exceptions, none more shameful than our relationship with aboriginal peoples, we have done pretty well. For example, we have historically been above average on measures of equality, well ahead of the U.S. We were seen as proof that diversity and equality could coexist, that empathy and sharing could bridge differences in language, culture, lifestyle. We came to see immigration as a solution, not a problem, and to be open to refugees.

Even in our relationship with aboriginal peoples, this government’s historic apology for some of the most grievous wrongs could have been a signal of a new, more respectful relationship (especially needed after the abandonment of the Kelowna Accord).
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When governing is all short-term economic growth, then aboriginal rights and environmental protections become inconveniences to be ignored or managed. Refugees, the unemployed and the poor come to be seen and treated as freeloaders, a drag on the economy, rather than fellow citizens, often victims of an increasingly mean version of capitalism. And criminals are turned into convenient scapegoats for our fears and discontents, the most heinous offences and frightening offenders used to blind us to the reality that those are people in our prisons, most of whose lives could be repaired.

Our leaders try to convince us that the health of the so-called job creators is more important than that of the weakest among us. And, it seems, many of the richest and most powerful come to believe this and act on that basis, what some have called “trickle-down meanness,” one of the consequences of rising inequality, particularly when growth disproportionately benefits a small group of super-rich able effectively to secede from society and its mutual obligations. On measures of equality, we are slipping to the bottom relative to other rich countries.

The debate brewing about how to measure success is not just about measurement. It is a recognition that we need to participate in a real discussion about what we mean by the good life, the purpose of the economy, the kind of Canada we want. It is about decency and dignity. It is about our political and democratic institutions, the need to find much better ways to ensure that all voices, particularly those speaking for the marginalized, are heard. This may be the only way to restore a sense of the common good and win back the many who have given up on politics, party and government.

- And lest there be any doubt, the trend toward gorging at the top is only continuing - as the CCPA points out in its annual reminder that our CEOs have already soaked up more money in 2013 than the average Canadian will all year.

- Finally, I don't recall seeing too many Canadian examples of the U.S.' trend toward embarrassingly contrived equivalances between parties. But Michael Valpy makes quite the effort, placing scattered comments from a T-shirt design shop and unnamed "Internet posters" on par with the systematic demonization and defunding of dissenting voices by the Harper Cons' cabinet in order to blame all sides for a "politics of discord".

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- James Laxer points out how overreach by the wealthy and powerful inevitably leads to backlash - and how we're just scratching the surface of what's to come:

(R)ight-wing revolts can get out of hand and can create difficulties, even grave difficulties, for the rich and the powerful and the states that do their bidding.

The most overwhelmingly important such case was the French Revolution. The Revolution was preceded by a revolt of the rich and the powerful, known as the Revolte Nobiliare. That revolt, which sought to protect the privileges of the nobility, gravely weakened the French state. It opened the way for a transformative social revolution, a revolution that swept away the actors and institutions that had launched the Revolte Nobiliare, overturning the monarchy and the entrenched rights of the nobility in the process. What is significant for today is that a political upheaval begun by the forces of social and political reaction can end up generating an upheaval that is utterly different from the one the reactionaries had in mind.
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The harsh policies being pursued in North America, the U.K., and the Euro Zone countries are pressing the ill effects of austerity down on the large majority of the population, while the wealthiest and most economically powerful see their incomes soar and are assured that the state will bail them out when necessary. This is their state and they know it. The young in the advanced countries are having their futures stolen from them. Opportunities shrink and the price of post-secondary education soars ever higher. Upward mobility, always the safety valve in capitalist society, is being choked off.
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Those at the helm on both sides of the Atlantic are playing dangerous games. It is far from certain that they will be able to control the forces they are unleashing. Some may believe that we live in the eternal present of neo-liberalism. History shows us that that is not a good bet.

- Meanwhile, Linda McQuaig highlights how Jack Layton's eulogy has come to be a rallying cry for Canadian progressives. And Michael Valpy notes that Layton's death has caused a broad swath of Canadians to recognize and affirm that they share his values:

It’s been suggested the deep emotional response was to the suddenness of his passing, or to the cruel irony of death striking him down while the applause still rang out for his grand electoral success. If that’s all that was involved, it would be a shallow saga, soon forgotten. Something struck a chord across the country – not all of it mind – but in the big cities where progressive voices have long felt comfortable. It struck, that chord, as a public manifestation of a collective worry about what Mr. Layton’s loss — Jack’s loss — meant for so many Canadians’ values, the not-quite-taken-shape articulation of people who feel threatened, who see themselves governed by politicians holding alien values, beliefs and behaviour.

It’s a chord of frustration about a country increasingly seen as the domain of conservative politics, conservative values and a dominant narrative that decries a mythic ‘downtown elite’ (and even the public cost of marking their death).

It’s a chord of protest against a domain that doesn’t want libraries, social housing or a long form census but only lower taxes and more fighter jets. A chord of resentment sounded by people who have felt themselves unable to self-identify as progressives in the way Jack Layton consistently did, with an unrepentant pride in his beliefs.

For people holding the same convictions, his death has made them want to shout out loud what they shared with him. We think it’s maybe as simple as that.

- And for all the talk surrounding his possible leadership bid, it's hard to disagree with Brian Topp as to the NDP's role:

"No one will replace Jack. But we can continue his work," said Topp.

"That will be about carrying forward his approach to politics. It will be about continuing to focus on getting things done that matter to people. It will be about compellingly representing the people of Quebec.

"And it will be about persuading Canadians in other provinces that the next federal government can be a new, better, progressive and truly national one."

- Finally, Malcolm rightly questions why Saskatchewan's policy is being set by Manitoban reactionaries. But it shouldn't be news that the Wall government long since gave up any pretense that its decisions would be based on grassroots concerns in Saskatchewan.

Thursday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your day.

- Leftdog points out that the Wall government's regressive ideology is doing exactly what it usually does - resulting in workers losing ground as a result of stagnant wages and skyrocketing costs even as billions of dollars get funnelled to big business in the name of "growth".

- Meanwhile, Stephen Harper makes it abundantly clear that he'll happily pollute anything that doesn't fight back if it makes a few more corporate bucks.

- Macleans comments on the utter pointlessness of the Cons' dumb-on-crime approach:

The obvious result of these new rules will be to create a flood of Canadians into the prison system—many first-time offenders. If there was evidence that filling prisons with minor criminals was a successful method for fighting crime, then this scenario might make some sense. But such an approach clearly hasn’t worked in the United States, despite decades of effort. In fact, many states are now emptying their jails for budgetary reasons.

It is also worth noting that as a political device, the tough-on-crime omnibus bill is starting to look a bit long in the tooth. Recall that in 2008, the then-minority government of Stephen Harper packaged five separate crime bills into its Tackling Violent Crime Act and rammed it through Parliament as a confidence issue. Now, after three years of evidence that the violent crime rate is falling precipitously—and with cops in many cities forced to spend their shifts running speed traps and busting pot-smoking mothers—the government is simply repeating itself for reasons of political expediency.

Serious crime requires a serious response—there is no debate there. But we also need to remember that the iconic statue of justice holds a scale in her hand for a reason: justice requires balance.

- Finally, in commenting on Le Bon Jack, Michael Valpy writes about what Canada's election results really mean:

When polls from the past federal election are closely analyzed, what shows up is that Mr. Harper’s Conservatives were elected by a lot of old people — people over the age of 45 whose electoral participation rate is between 60 and 80 per cent, climbing higher as they climb to meet their Maker. People under the age of 45 were powerfully anti-Conservative but at best only about 40 per cent of them voted. And if they had voted in the same proportion as the over-45s, there would not have been a Conservative majority; there probably wouldn’t have been a Conservative minority. What likely we might have got is an NDP-led coalition.

So then let’s suppose that half, at least half, of the electorate are powerfully opposed to Mr. Harper’s neo-liberalism, which is what the polls suggest. Let’s suppose they’re more in tune with Canada’s historic Red Toryism, the political culture that led to, in the words of philosopher George Grant (Michael Ignatieff’s uncle, although Mr. Ignatieff didn’t like his thinking) “a country which had a strong sense of the common good … that was possible under the individualism of the capitalist dream.” We certainly know this is the case in Quebec. We certainly know that younger Canadians, and even a significant chunk of older Canadians, have a strong sense of the common good and don’t like the contemporary conservative ideology of the individual.

Without Mr. Layton — without Jack, le bon Jack — it does not mean Canadians opposed to Mr. Harper’s neo-liberalism are simply going to go elsewhere or become less engaged with their democracy. It doesn’t mean Quebeckers are going to abandon their fling with the NDP.
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Mr. Layton can accurately be seen as the catalyst, not the seducer, both of Quebec’s re-engagement with the country and of a debate within the whole country about its political values.