Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Claire Connelly calls out the perennial right-wing spin that there's always money available for corporations or the security state, but that anything which would actually help people is invariably unaffordable. And Jim Pugh discusses how Republicans are looking to punish and impoverish the working class by putting up unreasonable barriers to social benefits:

While setting more unemployed Americans on a path to employment and economic self-sufficiency is a positive goal, the threat of withholding food is a highly ineffective way to encourage workforce participation. Some of the most common barriers to employment are insufficient education or skills, mental health issues, hiring biases and a lack of job opportunities. Fear of not having enough to eat does nothing to overcome those obstacles.

When people are hungry, they're frequently unable to focus, which makes it harder for them to get a job, not easier. Instead of boosting employment, this proposal would act as a barrier rather than an incentive.

The actual impact of this policy change would be to punish hungry Americans. In many regions of the country, people are struggling to find full-time work, but can't. While the overall unemployment rate sits at a low 3.8 percent, the rate of involuntary underemployment is more than twice that, and exceeds 10 percent in many states and counties. This proposal would leave those who are unable to find a job with neither income nor food assistance.

Instead of adding poorly-designed restrictions to SNAP, we should be pursuing evidence-based policy changes to increase the effectiveness of our social programs. As someone who works on universal basic income policy, I've spent years studying the effects of unconditional benefits, i.e. what happens when you offer people support without any requirements on their behavior. Every analysis has arrived at the same conclusion: When you give people benefits without strings attached, they use them for productive purposes. The vast majority of people want to do well in life, and they’ll make the most of any support they receive.

- Michael Rozworski's letter to the editor neatly summarizes the folly of reversing long-overdue increases to Ontario's minimum wage. And Kate Davidson comments on the importance of paying a fair minimum wage to service workers, rather than pointing to the illusory promise of tips as an excuse to grind people into poverty.

- Arian Taher discusses the radical difference between Adam Smith's humane ideal of capitalism, and the corporatist version which artificially concentrates wealth and power.

- Finally, James Wilt highlights how Doug Ford's false majority offers a compelling example in favour of British Columbia's electoral reform vote.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Jonathan Amos and Victoria Gill report on Antarctica's alarming rate of melting - with three trillion tons of ice lost in the past 25 years. Peter Erickson reminds us that the avoidable greenhouse gas emissions from subsidized oil sands development will only make matters worse for the world as a whole. And Crawford Kilian previews what we can expect when the carbon bubble bursts:

Some models assume we will work hard to keep global warming to a two-degree rise or less by moving to renewable energy and cutting back on fossil fuels; others assume we won’t, and will keep burning oil and gas despite rising temperatures.

All the models end up with a “sellout” by 2035 or earlier, in which oil-producing nations put on history’s greatest bargain sale, dropping oil prices as low as possible just to get it out of the ground before demand falls to zero. After all, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau observed not long ago, “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” Least of all when all those barrels would soon be “stranded” in the ground and $1 trillion to $4 trillion vanishes from the global economy.

Once the sellout was truly under way, what would happen?
...
(O)ur domestic woes will be like those of many other rich countries, only worse. Migrants and refugees will still find Canada a better option than staying home. Wars, revolutions and climate-driven disasters will make demands on us we won’t feel able to respond to. Poverty at home will trigger new problems in public health, just as it has in Venezuela.

Mercure’s forecast is unlikely to be the first; governments and fossil fuel corporations alike have probably commissioned reports with similar conclusions. With such politically ugly implications, it’s understandable that such reports have not been publicized, let alone acted upon.

But a wise government would break the news to its people, commission still more studies, and commit to acting on them: cutting losses in fossil fuels, subsidizing renewable energy companies, and promoting research in the field that might give Canada a chance to catch up with other transitioning countries.

And if we ignore Mercure’s warning, we will learn our lesson anyway, with a tuition fee of up to $4 trillion.

- Keith Reynolds studies the billions of dollars British Columbia is paying to the corporate sector due to its use of P3s rather than public ownership.

- The Guardian rightly argues that rather than limiting itself to empty words, the UK should be responding to the Grenfell Tower disaster by ensuring safe housing for everybody. And Laura Paddison examines the glaring lack of affordable housing for U.S. renters.

- Finally, Karl Nerenberg writes about Doug Ford's first-past-the-post-dependent election win. And Martin Lukacs discusses the urgent need for a strong grassroots movement to counter Ford's top-down destruction.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Julian Baggini discusses the importance of talking about taxes as a force for the common good - particularly as a response to (and inoculation against) inane "tax freedom" rhetoric:

(W)e need to counter the subtle ways in which we are complicit in the taxophobics’ game. Think about how every newspaper and news outlet reports the budget. The bottom line is always presented in terms of whether tax changes leave specific types of people better or worse off, usually by mere pennies per week. The most important test of a budget should not be how taxes hit individuals’ pockets, but whether overall government is sustainably improving the state of the nation. Taxing less than we need to is as bad as taxing more than is necessary.

These changes in how we think and talk might strike you as modest and uncontroversial. Proof that they are anything but is that a campaign to start celebrating social solidarity day would today be laughed off as some kind of politically correct joke. Unless and until we make it normal to see taxation primarily as a valuable contribution to our own and the common good, the narrative that government is the enemy and tax is theft will continue to prevail.

- And Thomas Torslov, Ludvig Weir and Gabriel Zucman study the massive amounts of tax revenue being siphoned into tax havens to enrich shareholders at the expense of any contribution to the public interest.

- Toby Helm writes about the latest research demonstrating a connection between rising inequality and decreasing union membership. And Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett comment on how inequality leads to stress and anxiety. 

- Finally, Tom Parkin writes about Ontario's rejection of one form of cynical politics - though it's worth noting that both the Wynne Libs and Ford PCs managed to achieve their end-of-campaign goals which put political interests ahead of the public.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- J.W. Mason reviews Quinn Slobodian's Globalists with a reminder that the decades-long push to subjugate popular democracy to corporate interests is nothing new - and that we know well the consequences:

In the early twentieth century, there were many people who saw popular sovereignty as a problem to be solved. In a world where dynastic rule had been swept offstage, formal democracy might be unavoidable; and elections served an important role in channeling the demands that might otherwise be expressed through “the right to the street.” But the idea that the people, acting through their political representatives, were the highest authority and entitled to rewrite law, property rights, and contracts in the public interest—this was unacceptable. One way or another, government by the people had to be reined in.

Mises’ writings from a century ago often sound as if they belong in speeches by modern European conservatives such as German Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble. The welfare state is unaffordable, Mises says; workers’ excessive wage demands have rendered them unemployable, governments’ uncontrolled spending will be punished by financial markets, and “English and German workers may have to descend to the lowly standard of life of the Hindus and the coolies to compete with them.”

Quinn Slobodian argues that the similarities between Mises then and Schäuble today are not a coincidence. They are products of a coherent body of thought: neoliberalism, or the Geneva school. His book, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, is a history of the “genealogy of thought that linked the neoliberal world economic imaginary from the 1920s to the 1990s.”

The book puts to rest the idea that “neoliberal” lacks a clear referent. As Slobodian meticulously documents, the term has been used since the 1920s by a distinct group of thinkers and policymakers who are unified both by a shared political vision and a web of personal and professional links.

...

Property and its privileges are only safe in a world where the rule of money is accepted as objective, inevitable, and outside the scope of collective decision-making. The problem is that the concrete demands of statecraft often require governments to control economic outcomes, depriving them their aura of objective fact. When enemy forces are massed on the border or unemployed workers are rioting in the streets, no government that wants to remain in power can accept economic outcomes as facts beyond their control, like the weather.

But once the Pandora’s box of conscious management of the economy is opened, governments can use the power they now know they possess for all kinds of other ends. In a democratic state, a planning apparatus developed to mobilize in war or cope with economic crises may easily be redirected to serve a broader agenda.

- Doug Henwood writes that low wages and personal insecurity are a reality for U.S. workers even where more jobs than assumed are actually expected to last for a substantial period of time. And Brian Prowse-Gany and Joyzel Acevedo talk to Nick Hanauer about the false and manipulative claim that improved wages do anything to harm the availability of work.

- Charles Pierce highlights Scott Pruitt's selloff of public health in the U.S.

- Atif Shatique connects the recent critique of the "marshmallow test" with the destructive spread of conditional social benefits.

- Emma Teitel writes that our willingness to show concern about mental health in the weak of a celebrity suicide means little if we're not prepared to deal with both environmental causes and individual illnesses before tragedy strikes. And CBC reports on the latest report of the Provincial Auditor documenting the severe lack of mental health care in northern Saskatchewan.

- Finaly, Lana Payne discusses Doug Ford's election as the product of base emotion and an distorted electoral system.

Saturday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Trish Hennessy examines the aftermath of Ontario's provincial election, while Andrew Mitrovica traces the spread of Trumpian antisocial populism. And Doug Nesbitt offers some lessons for workers based on the province's previous PC government.

- David Roberts takes a look at our economic assumptions behind climate change policy, and notes that they're thoroughly distorted toward a lack of action.

- Linda McQuaig criticizes the Trudeau Libs for prioritizing the oil industry's profits ahead of the national interest. And Mitchell Anderson notes that the Canadian public is now one of the few actors foolish enough to spending large amounts of money trying to continue inflating a clearly-bursting oil bubble.

- Pam Palmater reminds us that Indigenous rights aren't subject to popular whims - even if public opinion still includes far too much baked-in racism. And Murray Mandryk comments on the Justice for our Stolen Children camp which is being evicted by the Saskatchewan Party in the name of  Canada Day festivities.

- Finally, Gary Mason is duly incredulous at the whining of multimillionaire Vancouver homeowners at the prospect of paying something closer to their fair share of the cost of a functioning community.

New column day

Here, on the parallels between the presidency of Donald Trump and the danger of a Doug Ford-led government in Ontario.

For further reading...
- Hugh Mackenzie has done the math on the PCs' non-platform, finding a fiscal hole of $13.75 billion every year.
- Graeme Gordon reports on Ontario Proud's voter spam and other intervention in Ontario's election.
- Christopher Guly comments on the rise of Andrea Horwath, and I've previously discussed the parallels between this campaign and other NDP successes. But Marieke Walsh notes the risk that the NDP might win the popular vote but fall short in the seat count.
- Martin Regg Cohn questions Ford's treatment of his own family - raising obvious questions about how cavalier he'd be with a provincial treasury at his disposal.
- Finally, for some of the better commentary on what to expect, see Bryan Breguet and tcnorris. And Ryan McGreal has assembled Breguet's data into a riding-by-riding guide.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Enzo Dimatteo offers a reminder of Toronto's disastrous experience with the Ford governance model, while Edward Keenan worries that Doug Ford is eager to run roughshod over the city if he gets the chance. PressProgress tallies up the large number of Ontario PC candidates campaigning while facing investigations and lawsuits. Cecilia Keating examines the Ontario NDP's plan for change for the better. And Christo Aivilis writes about the role young voters will play in charting Ontario's future - or allowing Ford to do so instead.

- Nav Persaud compares the Ontario provincial parties' respective positions on prescription drugs. Samir Sinha argues that the primary solution to hallway medicine lies in ensuring that people can get the care they need without needing to occupy a hospital bed.

- Sheila Block highlights the problems with pretending that corporate tax slashing has anything to do with economic development.

- Alex Hemingway discusses how unduly low land taxes can fuel a housing crisis, while Joshua Gottlieb and David Green point out that a property surtax is both efficient and fair compared to other revenue sources (not to mention highly popular).

- Finally, Fiona Harvey writes about the carbon bubble which is set to pop as clean energy becomes far cheaper than continued reliance on fossil fuels. And Stephen Leahy discusses the billions of dollars Canada continues to spend subsidizing the oil industry every year (beyond the price of the Trans Mountain bailout).

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Ed Broadbent examines how Doug Ford's platform (such as it is) would only further enrich the wealthy, while causing catastrophic results for everybody else:

Just imagine waking up on Friday morning and having to hear the phrase “Premier Doug Ford” for the next four years.  His record as an enabler of the irresponsible and chaotic mayoralty of his brother in Toronto, and the clear ethical failings of the Progressive Conservative Party under his leadership, point to dark days for this province should he win the June 7^th election.

Mr. Ford has campaigned on a promise to slash $6-billion from the provincial budget but has refused to specify how or where.  The mathematical inevitably of this scale of cuts could involve closing 36 hospitals, firing 28,000 nurses, closing 780 schools, and firing 20,000 teachers.

In addition, Mr. Ford’s commitment to “leave no stone unturned” when it comes to privatization, means all of our health care, schools and other vital public services are at risk.

The result of these cuts and privatization will be a much more expensive life for Ontario families.  Other damaging aspects of his plan include ignoring climate change, giving big corporations a $5 billion tax cut, and providing a huge tax benefit to the richest individuals in the province.

Mr. Ford’s extraordinary support from the most extreme of social conservatives and white supremacists should make us all concerned about any administration he would lead.  I have no doubt that electing Ford as Premier would bring divisive and destructive Trump-style politics to Canada.

- Toby Sanger takes a look at the tens of thousands of jobs which stand to be lost if Ford gets his way. And Tom Parkin writes that the NDP represents the responsible progressive alternative to know-nothing right-wing populism. 

- Daneil Summers discusses how predatory pricing is making an HIV prevention medication developed largely through public research funding inaccessible to the people who need it. And Julia Lurie exposes the lurid manipulations used to push opioids.

- Thomas Gunton highlights the irrationality of the Trudeau Libs' decision to waste public money on a Trans Mountain expansion.

- Finally, Chris Terry takes a look at British Columbia's electoral reform referendum - and its place in the pattern of making electoral results fairer and more proportional.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Andrew Anthony interviews Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett about their new book on the connection between inequality and mental illness. And Danny Dorling discusses the external (and preventable) causes of many mental health issues:

People working in separate disciplines are coming to the same conclusion: that our social worlds impact on us, they can give us health or cause us harm. As the UN puts it, “mental health policies and services are in crisis—not a crisis of chemical imbalances, but of power imbalances. We need bold political commitments, urgent policy responses and immediate remedial action.” This recent report calls for a shift from biomedical models of mental distress to a more radical, human rights-based approach, acknowledging the impacts of social inequality.

Another recent report published by the British Psychological Society, “The Power Threat Meaning Framework,” looks at the contextual factors which may make us sick. PTM acknowledges power inequalities and the impact of oppression. Being on the wrong side of power can lead to feelings of entrapment, shame and humiliation, as well as a sense of lacking control.

The framework highlights links between “poverty, discrimination and inequality, along with traumas such as abuse and violence, and the resulting emotional distress or troubled behaviour.” Adverse childhood experiences have a negative impact on health and wellbeing, for example.

Both The Inner Level and PTM reframe the narrative around why people get sick—refocusing the question from “What’s wrong with this individual?” to “What’s going wrong in this society?”

- Darren Bernhardt talks to Anna Cooper about the futility of trying to deal with homelessness by criminalizing and displacing homeless people, rather than dealing with the underlying causes. And Nick Saul points out that a fair minimum wage goes a long way toward ensuring that people can workers can afford a reasonable standard of living.

- Alex Press writes that the success of teachers' strikes in the U.S. offers an important reminder of the effectiveness of collective action. Mike Konczal comments on the role unions have played in reducing both economic and racial inequality, while Eric Levitz highlights how the labour movement as a whole is the antithesis of a "special interest group" but instead a positive force for the general public. And Gerard Di Trolio previews what workers in Ontario could expect from an NDP government.

- Meanwhile, David Moscrop discusses the no-brainer choice between Doug Ford's circus and the responsible social democracy of Andrea Horwath. And David Bush comments on what's at stake in Ontario's election.

- Finally, Thomas Homer-Dixon and Yonatan Strauch write about the folly of betting Canada's economic future on the hope that humanity will fail to address the existential threat of climate change.

On history repeating

I haven't yet commented much on Ontario's provincial election campaign - and readers interested in the race will find plenty of noteworthy observers on the blogroll.

That said, it's worth noting the parallels between this campaign and a couple of the NDP's other recent breakthroughs.

To start with, Ontario's 2018 election seems to be offering an answer to one of the more interesting hypotheticals about the 2011 federal election.

In that campaign, the NDP started out well behind the Cons and Libs - but with an experienced and trusted leader who was able to contrast his own image against that of two self-perceived frontrunners who spent most of the campaign attacking each other (or three in Quebec).

By the end of the race, Jack Layton had emerged as by far the most popular of the federal leaders, including by winning over a strong plurality of Quebec voters and expanding the NDP's potential voter pool from coast to coast to coast.

But he reached that position only well into the campaign. As a result, the Libs maintained some residual support from voters accustomed to their being the default alternative to the Cons - particularly in Ontario where strategic voting campaigns based on past electoral results actually helped the Cons win three-way races. And the result was Stephen Harper's one and only majority government - albeit challenged by a strong NDP opposition.

The great what-if for the NDP was thus what would have happened if the 2011 campaign had lasted just a couple more weeks. And we may be getting our answer. 

This year, Andrea Horwath's campaign is following in Layton's footsteps. She too was largely ignored at the start of the campaign as two highly-flawed parties and leaders tried to run only against each other; she too has expanded the NDP's potential voter pool far beyond what most outside observers anticipated; she too has managed to see an already-positive reputation improve in comparison to her opponents.

But after making her move in the polls somewhat earlier in the campaign, Horwath has had enough time for voters to get comfortable with the concept of an NDP victory. And yesterday's effective concession by Kathleen Wynne means that late-deciding voters will have no doubt as to which party is actually running to provide an alternative to a Doug Ford government.

For another historical precedent, that suggests David Climenhaga might be right on the money in his long-standing comparison to Alberta's 2015 election - right down to the divided and unpopular right-wing party whose only apparent late-campaign move is to hope that voters will defer to corporate insiders in casting their ballots.

Of course, there are still some important obstacles in Horwath's way - particularly the uncertainty as to the efficiency of her party's support. But it looks entirely plausible that Horwath's wave may have crested at the right time where Layton's fell just short.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Cherise Seucharan interviews Andrew MacLeod about his new book on the health benefits of investing in income, housing and education. And Kyle Edwards discusses the unconscionable number of Indigenous children being put in foster care.

- Ben Smee reports on the UK's parliamentary inquiry into franchising - including evidence that franchisees have been advised to use wage theft and exploitation of vulnerable workers as regular business strategies. And Jeffry Bartash examines new U.S. data showing that an unusually high number of employees are seeing no raises despite a supposedly tight job market.

- Meanwhile, Jude Kirton-Darling and Agnes Jongerius report on a new EU law - fought tooth and nail by the UK's Cons - intended to ensure that the free movement of workers doesn't serve to undercut wages and employment standards.

- Robert Benzie reports on the Ontario NDP's plan for a rent registry for transparency in housing pricing (and as a safeguard against "renovictions").

- Finally, Kevin Taft comments that the Trans Mountain buyoff and expansion look to be symptoms of a continued addiction to fossil fuels. And James Wilt interviews Peter Erickson about the long-term ramifications of those choices today.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Frances Ryan rightly calls out the anti-choice right for having no interest in the well-being of children once they're born:

(S)mall-state ideology can make it devastatingly difficult for a low-income parent to look after a child. Look at the controversial “two-child” limit to child tax credits under universal credit (UC). From its inception, it was predicted the policy would lead to hundreds of thousands of additional children living in poverty, but it’s now emerging that some women are even feeling forced to have abortions because they can’t afford to go ahead with the pregnancy. “It wasn’t planned but it was very much wanted. I was crying as they wheeled me in,” one woman told the Mirror this month about her abortion; without the safety net of tax credits, she had no way to afford another baby. Women in Northern Ireland in similar positions have an even more restricted choice: the rape-exemption clause that gives some women on UC a financial reprieve endangers women who haven’t reported their attack to the police (in Northern Ireland, failure to report a crime is an offence) and, as the renewed calls for reproductive rights in light of the Irish vote has highlighted, Northern Irish women have no legal access to abortion in their own country if they feel they can’t raise a child.

Recent years have in fact seen a determined removal of support from low-income mothers – everything from forcing single parents (90% of whom are women) to look for work once their child turns three or have their benefits sanctioned, to the benefit cap, a policy so regressive it was actually ruled to be unlawful when forced on single parents with toddlers.
...
In the post-crash austerity era, this sense of social solidarity towards children has noticeably lessened. Under each policy to remove state support from parents there’s a lurking narrative that working-class women are “breeding too much” or that low-income children are drains on the “hardworking taxpayer”. (“Why should I pay for someone else to have more kids?” is the rejoinder on most articles advocating child benefits). In the real world, pregnancy is rarely predictable – contraception fails, relationships end, and jobs are lost – and besides, even the most ardent individualist would admit low-income children have done nothing to “deserve” their own poverty.

We are at the point in which it is not rare to hear of infants living in B&Bs, sleeping on cardboard, or even scrambling for food in school bins. If the ongoing debate over abortion rights teaches us anything, it’s that there are no shortage of voices content to defend the “unborn”. It’s a shame few are willing to give the same care to those children who are already here.

- And Elizabeth Wall-Weiler points out the vicious cycle of separating children from teenage mothers in care - which tends only to ensure a lack of family security across generations.

- Edgardo Sepulveda examines the effect on inequality of the party platforms in Ontario's provincial election, showing the stark distinction between the increased fairness of the NDP's platform and the exacerbated inequality on offer from Doug Ford. And Michael Laxer's roundup contrasts the real Conservative scandals which have been downplayed by the media against the contrived attempts to manufacture controversy surrounding the NDP. 

- Andrew Jackson reviews Christo Aivailis' The Constant Liberal on Pierre Trudeau's consistent pattern of trying absorb progressive activity into centrist power structures to dilute its ultimate effect.

- Finally, Helene Laverdiere criticizes the Libs' insistence on enabling the sale of arms to human rights abusers.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Peter Goodman discusses how austerity has changed society for the worse in the UK:

For a nation with a storied history of public largess, the protracted campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by a government led by the Conservative Party, has delivered a monumental shift in British life. A wave of austerity has yielded a country that has grown accustomed to living with less, even as many measures of social well-being — crime rates, opioid addiction, infant mortality, childhood poverty and homelessness — point to a deteriorating quality of life.
...
By 2020, reductions already set in motion will produce cuts to British social welfare programs exceeding $36 billion a year compared with a decade earlier, or more than $900 annually for every working-age person in the country, according to a report from the Center for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. In Liverpool, the losses will reach $1,200 a year per working-age person, the study says.
...
But the reality at hand is dominated by worries that Britain’s pending departure from the European Union — Brexit, as it is known — will depress growth for years to come. Though every major economy on earth has been expanding lately, Britain’s barely grew during the first three months of 2018. The unemployment rate sits just above 4 percent — its lowest level since 1975 — yet most wages remain lower than a decade ago, after accounting for rising prices.
...
In the blue-collar reaches of northern England, in places like Liverpool, modern history tends to be told in the cadence of lamentation, as the story of one indignity after another. In these communities, Mrs. Thatcher’s name is an epithet, and austerity is the latest villain: London bankers concocted a financial crisis, multiplying their wealth through reckless gambling; then London politicians used budget deficits as an excuse to cut spending on the poor while handing tax cuts to corporations. Robin Hood, reversed. 

- Noelle Sullivan and Lisa Ann Richey offer a reminder that we won't successfully fight poverty by throwing money at self-serving corporate public relations campaigns. And LA Kouffman comments on the need for protest and other collective activism to push for social change.

- Jim Stanford examines the spread of precarious work in Australia, with less than half of current jobs meeting a basic definition of "standard" secure work. And Tracey Warren argues that any discussion about work-life balance needs to take into account the individual effects of poverty-level wages.

- Finally, Richard Florida warns Ontario voters about the economic risks of allowing Doug Ford to tear down progress in the name of know-nothing populism.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Martin Lukacs offers a reminder that Doug Ford is nothing but a mercenary for his fellow children of privilege, while Andrea Horwath's NDP actually offers a platform which will benefit the 99%. And Michal Rozworski observes that Ontario's election is properly focusing on contrasting priorities rather than an obsession over deficit numbers. 

- David Climenhaga challenges Rachel Notley's attempt to scupper any discussion about pharmacare - even when it stands to save money for Alberta and the other provinces - in the name of putting pipelines first. And the Narwhal publishes an open letter challenging the approval of the Trans Mountain expansion in the absence of meaningful scientific support.

- Paul McKay notes that new rules governing sulphur content for shipping fuel may take a substantial bite out of the market for dilbit from the oil sands. And Damian Carrington reports on new research showing that the global cost of climate change will far exceed the price of reining in greenhouse gas emissions.

- Bridget Yard reports on the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission's survey of Saskatoon renters, including its finding of explicit discrimination against Indigenous people, single mothers and people receiving social assistance.

- Finally, Wendy Stueck reports on FSIN's newly-announced suicide prevention strategy - while noting the need for the provincial and federal governments to care enough about Indigenous people's lives to contribute.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Dru Oja Jay points out the connections between improved public services, decreased inequality and meaningful action to fight climate change.

- Adam Corlett challenges spin from the UK Conservatives intended to mislead voters about the relative tax contributions of the wealthy as opposed to everybody else. And Larry Elliott reports on the harm the Conservatives' austerity has done to an underfunded public health system.

- Meanwhile, Matt Taylor writes that the U.S. is setting up the next financial crisis by once again handing reckless banksters the ability to write their own rules. 

- Andrew Jackson calls for a new Canadian trade strategy aimed at establishing a fair playing field including protections for workers and the environment in any country seeking preferential access to Canadian consumers.

- Lois Ross highlights the need for migrant farm labourers to be offered the same protections which apply to other workers.

- Laurie Monsebraaten reports on a healthy drop in food bank use in Ontario due to a combination of an improved minimum wage and increased social benefits. And Seth Klein and Iglka Ivanova point out how British Columbia can and should put an end to deep poverty in the very near future.

- Finally, Jim Stanford argues that a minor complaint over a modest mistake in the Ontario NDP's fully-costed platform serves largely to highlight the utter lack of transparency or plausibility in the scattershot promises made by Doug Ford and the PCs.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Tom Parkin discusses the distinction between giveaways to the rich which are perpetually seen as carrying no price, and the expansion of the commons which is treated as intolerably costly:

(O)ffer something that is actually free and things get downright snarky. In the currently Ontario election, the NDP platform includes a free drug plan, free dental benefits and free childcare for lower income households. There’s no fee, toll or service charge. It really is free to the user, paid for through our progressive tax system.

In Horwath’s plan, tax on income over $220,000 goes up one point, tax over $300,000 goes up a second. It’s all accounted for.

Now suddenly come a wave of objections—the service “isn’t really free,” say detractors as if there is some sort of deception.

But just stop. We use lots of great free public services everyday, paid by our progressive tax system.

Roads and bridges. Parks. Schools. Health care. Libraries. Police. Firefighters. Armed Forces. Coast Guard. It’s a long list.

And it we want we can add a free drug plan, dental benefits and child care. And just like our roads and health care, they will be paid through our progressive income tax. There’s no deception.

And these new public services are right. Working people are struggling. Families with two incomes need affordable childcare. Fewer workers get union dental and drug benefits. Wages are stagnant. But executive compensation is skyrocketing. It’s fair.

Boil it all down, here’s the basic point. In our society, free money for rich people requires no explanation. Free public services, even if fully paid for, are an outrage. Go get it at my supermarket.

- But on the bright side, David Climenhaga renews his prediction that the Horwath NDP's plan for a more caring and secure society will win out over Doug Ford's attempt to get the working class to vote for exploitation by the rich.

- Meanwhile, Patrick Greenfield and Sarah Marsh highlight how the UK is criminalizing homelessness. And Justin Wm. Moyer reports on the 7 million Americans who have lost their drivers' licences - and in many cases their ability to legally meet the availability demands of most employers - to punitive traffic debt.

- Finally, The Mound of Sound takes note of the grim milestone that's seen the Earth above its normal temperature for 400 consecutive months. And Damian Carrington offers a reminder that even as the worst effects of climate change loom in the future, humanity's track record involves the widespread destruction of plant and animal species.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

-The UK's Association of Directors of Public Health speaks out (PDF) about the importance of giving children the best possible start in life - including through security in the essentials of life.

- But Christina Gibson-Davis and Christine Perchenski write about the increased inequality that is leaving a large majority of families in the U.S. with no safety net. And Matthew Stewart breaks down the U.S.' income brackets into the .1% which is accumulating wealth faster than it can spend, the 90% which is falling behind, and the 9.9% between the two which has mostly held its position.

- Melissa Davey comments on the lack of investigation and punishment of wage theft in Australia. But David Marin-Guzman reports on one noteworthy example of an employer being sentenced to a meaningful jail term - if only for contempt of court after the employer breached an order to retain funds to pay workers. 

- Christian Breyer summarizes new research showing that a 100% renewable energy system is entirely feasible and affordable. And David Fickling notes that for that reason, the next key developments in energy figure to involve storing the product of intermittent renewable sources, not looking for excuses to keep extracting and burning fossil fuels.

- Meanwhile, Wal van Lierop calls for a reality check about the future of an oil-dependent economy (and the construction of pipelines intended to extend that dependence).

- Finally, Tabatha Southey examines the parallels between Doug Ford and Donald Trump as overgrown children of privilege trying to use populist language to further indulge the advantages they've held. And Paul Wells writes about Andrea Horwath's campaign as she offers Ontario a positie alternative.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Noah Smith writes that public resentment toward the U.S.' wealthiest few is based on a genuine (and justified) concern about an economic system rigged to exacerbate inequality across generations, not mere envy toward the people who have more:

(R)esentment of the super-rich is probably not simply envy. It likely has to do with notions of fairness. As economist N. Gregory Mankiw conjectured in a 2013 essay, people are more likely to begrudge vast fortunes if they feel the wealth wasn’t earned. Technology company founders may be rich, but they mostly got that way by creating new products or services that benefit many people’s lives — think PayPal or iPhones or Facebook. Similarly, rich athletes or entertainers used their talents to make life more enjoyable for millions of Americans.

But about 38 percent of American billionaires inherited at least a substantial part of their fortunes. These heirs and heiresses tend to be less in the public eye, but they hold vast sums nonetheless. Taxing these unearned billions seems like a great way to allay public concerns about the super-rich.

Economics provides both empirical and theoretical support for the idea of taxing inheritances at much higher rates, and making the tax much harder to avoid. Surveys find that informing people about wealth inequality makes them much more likely to support higher estate taxes, but only slightly more likely to support other forms of taxation. And economic theory suggests that taxing wealthy inheritors can increase economic efficiency if many of them are bad investors.

So one idea to address popular anger over the dramatic success of a few super-rich individuals is to stop them from passing most of those fortunes on to their children. That won’t take the Elon Musks and the Mark Zuckerbergs out of the news, but it will reassure Americans that most of their crazy-rich countrymen made their own money through hard work and talent, not just the luck of having rich parents.

- George Eaton discusses the combination of popular support which is leading toward increasing public ownership of the UK's public services. And David Zarnett reports on the Wynne government's giveaway of a profitable casino for pennies on the dollar - representing just one more example of how the public loses out when neoliberal government focus on privatization over competent management.

- Adam Litwin, Ariel Avgar and Edmund Becker study (PDF) how the outsourcing of cleaning services in hospitals leads to the increased spread of infectious diseases.

- Bernard Goldstein comments on another of the Trump administration's moves to prevent regulators from doing their jobs, this time by making a policy of rejecting some of the best available environmental studies.

- Finally, following up on this week's column, Samir Shaheen-Hussain points out another policy choice which results in children being deprived of family support when it's needed most, as air ambulances refuse to allow parents to accompany Inuit children to receive care.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- George Monbiot discusses the dangers of treating our natural environment solely as something to be priced and commodified.

- The Mound of Sound comments on Stephen Leahy's work in crunching the numbers on the climate change impact of a Trans Mountain expansion. And Matt Scuffham and Rod Nickel report on Bill Morneau's apparent plan to divert Canada Pension Plan funds into forcing through a pipeline which can't find private investors.

- Nora Loreto writes about Canada's criminalization of dissent on the left. And Nathan Robinson argues that the right's perpetual persecution complex serves mostly to distract from the suppression of anti-establishment speech:

I want to suggest a hypothesis that may sound outlandish: What if the whole narrative is backwards? What if people who think they are voicing suppressed dangerous ideas are actually the ones suppressing the truly dangerous ideas? What if this effort to condemn the irrational excesses of political correctness is in part a way of avoiding having to engage with its arguments and listen carefully to its advocates? What if people who seem to be “challenging” a dissent-stifling power structure are actually defending one? Now, I’m not saying this is the case; I’m just asking some questions. But let’s, for a moment, because we are rational and skeptical, consider the possibility that the conservative narrative is totally upside-down. Let’s picture a topsy-turvy world in which Donald Trump is the president and left ideas are actually marginal. 
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...I’m just asking us to imagine a strange world in which the interests of the wealthy mattered far more than the interests of the poor, and in which the good people got left behind while the bad people were honored and celebrated. But let’s stick with the idea, just a moment longer. In this kind of world, what would we make of people like the members of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” who insist that their ideas pose a challenge to the mainstream consensus? Well, first we’d have to look at the ideas themselves. But if those ideas turned out to coincide remarkably well with the interests of those who are already wealthy and powerful, and if those ideas seemed to downplay, deny, and evade all of the contrary evidence, we might begin to suspect that these Dissident Intellectuals should not, in fact, rightfully be considered dissidents. In this kind of world, the real dissidents would be the ones whose names we didn’t know, the ones who were trying to dredge up the truths nobody wanted to listen to, rather than the people whose faces and opinions were constantly in the newspapers. The dangerous ideas would be the ones that weren’t spoken from the White House and on cable news, because they actually indicted those institutions rather than benefiting them.

- And finally, Rinaldo Wolcott and Naomi Klein discuss how Ontarians can prevent Trumpism from spreading into their provincial government by voting for the change they actually want.

Thursday Evening Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Alex Boutilier discusses the glaring gap between hype and reality when it comes to tech sector jobs. And Virgina Eubanks writes about the futility of expecting miracles from algorithms in allocating grossly insufficient funding for social programs.

- Meanwhile, Dean Baker argues that if anybody should face the prospect of workfare, it's the financial-sector profiteers who enrich themselves while offering poor service managing public assets such as pensions.

- Geoffrey Stevens warns Ontario voters not to once again saddle their province with the mindset which brought them Walkerton and other avoidable tragedies. And Vjosa Isai's report on toxic chemicals in Canadian baby products should instead confirm the need for far stronger protection of the public against corporate irresponsibility.

- And Rachel Cohen discusses the findings of Alex Taborrok, a libertarian economist who wanted to prove a connection between regulations and economic stagnation - but instead demonstrated that one has nothing to do with the other:

(F)or the first time, economists could more confidently measure federal regulations over time and by industry. In theory, that would make it easier to build the case that regulations were hurting the economy.

For his first paper using the database, Tabarrok decided to analyze the effect of federal regulation on “economic dynamism”—a catch-all term referring to the rate at which new businesses launch and grow, and at which people switch jobs, lose jobs, or migrate for work. There has been a notable and somewhat mysterious decline in dynamism over the last few decades. The rate at which start-ups form is half of what it was forty years ago, the fraction of workers who bounce from one job to another—a sign of competitive labor markets—has plunged, productivity has slowed, and adult employment remains well below its early-2000 peak.

Armed with RegData, Tabarrok and Goldschlag set out to show that regulations were at least partly to blame. But they couldn’t. There was simply no correlation, they found, between the degree of federal regulation and the decline of business dynamism. The decline was seen across many different industries, including those that are heavily regulated and those that are not. They tried two other independent tests that didn’t rely on RegData, and came to the same conclusion: an increase in federal regulation just could not explain what was going on.
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Indeed, the new paper undermines one of the most deeply held convictions of the American right, one that unites libertarians like Tabarrok with mainstream conservatives: that regulations inevitably impose “deadweight loss” on the economy and are therefore an enemy of economic growth. This idea has been a mainstay of Republican politics since the Reagan era, and the Trump administration has taken to deregulation with missionary zeal. In fact, it’s probably the policy objective that the administration has pursued most successfully—rolling back the Clean Power Plan, repealing net neutrality, freezing the fiduciary rule, and on and on.

The premise that regulations come at the expense of economic activity—that we must always make trade-offs between safety and jobs—is so pervasive that even the American left tends to accept it, defending regulations as necessary evils to promote other social goods. Yet there has never been strong evidence that these trade-offs actually exist. To the contrary, federal regulations have often driven growth and innovation, whether it’s fuel standards spurring new electric cars and solar energy, or the Dodd-Frank law causing an entirely new industry—financial technology—to appear out of whole cloth.

- Finally, Marie Burge criticizes the P.E.I. Liberals' latest efforts to avoid a fair referendum on electoral reform.