Wednesday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your afternoon reading.

- Ladies and gentlemen, your fully accountable Treasury Board president:

Clement, the MP for Parry Sound-Muskoka and a former Ontario cabinet minister in the Mike Harris years, emerged from Conservative caucus Wednesday to make the announcement in a brief statement to the media.

“We have arranged for myself and others including (Foreign Affairs Minister John) Baird, who had his responsibilities in the program, (Infrastructure) Minister (Denis) LeBel and others to appear before the public accounts committee in the weeks ahead,” he said.

As a result, “parliamentarians will have a full right to ask any additional questions they may have,” Clement added.

Clement then turned and left, refusing to answer reporters’ shouted questions about why he has never stood in the Commons chamber to explain his role in the disbursal of nearly $50 million in G8 Legacy Fund spending in his riding last year.

Incidentally, it's worth raising some question as to the Cons' strategy in the committee hearing. Keep in mind that for the past few weeks, the NDP has been able to reveal more and more of its own research on Clement, keeping the story in the news despite his refusal to answer questions: so might the goal of the committee hearing be to allow the Cons to force everything out into the open now with a single opportunity for MPs to ask any questions at all of Clement before the Cons again declare the subject closed?

- I ask of course only because of the Cons' habits of engaging in Parliamentary warfare and taking unaccountability to new depths.

- Meanwhile, the Star-Phoenix editorial board chimes in on how the Cons' ideology is damaging Canada and the world:

It is not without irony that, as parliamentarians were carrying on their fruitless last hours of debating the crime bill, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was conducting an unprecedented face-to-face meeting with both Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, presumably to discuss the dire global economic situation.

The meeting comes as a group of economists are questioning the efficacy of the type of fiscal austerity Mr. Harper has been preaching in the face of growing evidence that the world is in danger of slipping into a 1930s-like, double-dip recession. The economists note the Depression was a result of such government action.
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Although Saskatchewan is experiencing a remarkable boom, among the first victims of a serious global recession is likely to be commodity prices - just as was the case in the 1930s.

It's also the case with this omnibus crime bill, which will disproportionately hit the pocketbooks of those jurisdictions with serious social problems or large aboriginal populations, because of the restrictions placed on judges' ability to take into account special circumstances. The federal government blindly sticking to ideology rather than weighing economic evidence could be a disaster for Saskatchewan.

Canada requires better than a government that ignores facts and limits debates.

- Finally, Cliff nicely highlights the corporatist push to grant rights to capital while denying them to people:

Neil Reynolds today demonstrates the traditional fondness of right wing libertarians for dictatorial authoritarian regimes with a column expressing almost unalloyed admiration for Singapore, a country even (Reynolds) is forced to admit is severely authoritarian.

Some may be surprised at how a self professed libertarian could seem so enthusiastic about a borderline totalitarian state with pervasive, constant surveillance, barbaric criminal law and a rigidly authoritarian state apparatus. Silly rabbit, right wing libertarians don't want liberty for people, people sometimes use liberty to band together against the depredations of capital, and capital is the only thing (Reynolds) and his ilk want liberty for. Capital and those who have it.
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So-called 'Free Markets' are the only freedom Reynolds gets passionate about, free people can become obstructive to that freedom through quaint concerns about the environment or workers rights or a decent social safety net and that's a freedom he seems to believe should be discouraged.

Wednesday Morning Links

Content goes here.

- Linda McQuaig's latest column builds on the inequality theme of The Trouble With Billionaires, pointing out how wealth turns into other forms of power as well:

The wealthy exert influence not just through campaign contributions, but at every stage of the political process: in the forming of political parties, the writing of party platforms, the selection of candidates, the drafting and amending of legislation, not to mention the shaping of public opinion through think-tanks and media ownership.

The wealthy also often employ a form of blackmail, either directly or indirectly threatening they'll leave the country if governments don't capitulate to their demands for lower taxes. While it's hard to imagine political leaders caving in to similar threats from other groups -- say, electricians or teachers -- the sheer economic power of the wealthy seems to quickly bring governments to heel.

- Which would surely make for yet another point of confusion for Rafe Mair's Man from Mars:

Our Man from Mars would look at how we run our business affairs and would be struck by the way large pools of capital form themselves into corporations that can't be controlled. How would we expect them to be controlled when the people who want nice comfy laws finance the governing party which makes up the rules?

MFM would note that corporations spend huge sums anaesthetizing the public with full paid ads on every aspect of life telling the bumpkins what wonderful corporate citizens they are and how all their decisions were for the good of all. These ads make no reference to the fact that their only obligation is to make money for the shareholder and their good behaviour is in the hands of a friendly, indeed compliant, government.
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Our Man from Mars, writing his report, would conclude that western democracies call themselves democracies much like communist countries once did. On being questioned about the liberties of citizens as compared to places like China, he would be bound to conclude that these Canadians have more freedom but that's steadily eroding and that, besides, the free speech in this country is about as effective as going out in a boat by yourself and shouting damnation on the powers that dictate and enforce.

- And as if to prove Mair's and McQuaig's points, here's Neil Reynolds predictably beating the drum for tax cuts even when they contradict his own data:

Canadian tax-collection statistics suggest that this supply-side law may well be operative here – only more so. On average, we remit to the federal government only 16.6 per cent of GDP in taxes regardless of rates. In the 1960s, it was 15.9 per cent of GDP. In the 1970s, 17.3 per cent. In the 1980s, 15.5 per cent. In the 1990s, 17.7 per cent. (From 2001 through 2009, reflecting a serious recession, revenue from all tax sources fell to 14.3 per cent.)

For those keeping track, that would make for a 3.4% difference between the 1990s (when taxes were hiked in order to balance budgets) and the 2000s (when taxes were lowered as the first order of business once deficits were brought down) - included in Reynolds' column in support of the theory that tax rates don't affect revenue. But fortunately, he's on the right side of the corporate media, so he'll be taken far more seriously than those of us who actually look at the numbers.

[Update: For a more thorough debunking, see Erin's post.]

- Meanwhile, Colby Cosh is right to note that "disappearing middle class" isn't necessarily the right term for extreme wealth inequality, and that "between neighbourhood" comparisons probably aren't the best way of analyzing the disparity. But can we also agree that it's worth doing something to address the danger of a "new Gilded Age, a realm of pervasively low marginal taxes and new deregulated industries" once we've removed those less-obvious problems from the picture?

- Finally, Ned Franks nicely connects the dots between the Cons' unproductive Parliaments in terms of the number of bills passed, and the fact that they've used omnibus budget bills to pass major changes without serious review:

n terms of productivity, Parliament has reached a new low. According to Franks, only 45 per cent of the bills introduced by the Harper government thus far have actually made it through the entire legislative process to royal assent.

And that can't all be blamed on the tribulations of running a minority government. Franks' records show the minority government of Lester Pearson during the 1960s managed to see 86 per cent of its bills through to royal assent.

The Trudeau government (both minority and majority) managed 72 per cent, Mulroney's majority government hit 83 per cent and Chretien's majority batted 69 per cent.

Since the Second World War, the number of bills receiving royal assent each year has declined steadily from an average of 67 a year during the King-St. Laurent era to 27 under Harper.

That doesn't necessarily mean the Harper government is legislating less. Franks said the government pushed about half of a normal year's legislation through in a single bill — this year's massive budget implementation bill which included varied measures dealing with all manner of subjects from environmental assessments to the post office to the future of Canada's atomic energy industry.

Franks finds the trend to omnibus bills particularly worrisome since it short-circuits the whole point of parliamentary scrutiny in a healthy democracy.