Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Karen Foster and Tamara Krawchenko discuss how policy can - and should - be designed to improve intergenerational equity:

Canada trails far behind other industrialized nations in its attention to intergenerational equity. The country could do far more to report on a carefully defined intergenerational equity, track progress, and target it in policy development. Studies in this area are conducted in an ad hoc manner rather than being built into a systemic and ongoing review process, but they point to growing gaps between young and old. We agree with Paul Kershaw of the lobby group Generation Squeeze, who writes: “we risk fostering intergenerational inequity if our governments continue to show less urgency in responding to challenges facing younger generations than we do in responding to challenges facing older Canadians.”

We would take it one step further and urge policy-makers in Canada to take advantage of “generation’s” multiple meanings and dimensions. They should emphasize policies that mimic the relationships (kinship) that exist between different age groups, supporting the exchange of resources that occur between the old and the young over the course of their lives. This means carefully structuring the investments that people need at distinct points in their lives: public education, public pensions, parental leave, organized recreation, and so on.

Policy-makers should be careful to ensure that whatever policies are adopted under the banner of intergenerational equity are truly, equally targeted at supporting older and younger Canadians. Finally, although they should take care when forecasting and projecting into the future that they do not write cheques that future Canadians cannot cash, policy-makers also must resist the temptation to use intergenerational justice as an excuse for austerity.

- Patrick Butler reports on a U.N. inquiry concluding that the UK's needless austerity is infringing on the basic human rights of people living with disabilities.

- Scott Sinclair debunks the spin being used to sell the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the public which will face worsening inequality, higher prices and deteriorating working conditions it if ever comes into effect.

- Yvette Brend reminds us how social conditions including geography and gender influence both opportunities and outcomes for children. And Tavia Grant reports on a massive increase in First Nation participation in Canada's census which will hopefully facilitate the development of evidence-based policy to improve living conditions, while the Ottawa Citizen weighs in on the need to stop delaying steps to end discrimination against indigenous peoples.

- Finally, Tanara Yelland outlines the recommendations of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness as to how to end homelessness in Canada.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli discuss the worrisome spread of climate change denialism, particularly around the English-speaking developed world. But lest we accept the theory that declining public knowledge is independent of political choices, Margaret Munro reports that the Cons are suppressing factual scientific information about Arctic ice levels to avoid the Canadian public being better informed, while Tom Korski exposes a particularly galling example of their vilifying top scientists for reporting their results. And John O'Connor reminds us what's been done to anybody who's dared to speak out about the effect of unfettered tar sands development on local residents.

- Jim Bronskill reports that Transport Canada had been directly warned that safety standard exemptions granted to MMA would put workers and the public at risk in advance of last year's explosion in Lac-Megantic. And Bruce Campbell offers another study (summarized here) as to how regulatory failure was behind the disaster.

- Bloomberg reports that the U.S.' recovery has seen stagnant wages for most workers compared to gains at the top. And Henry Blodget highlights the even more glaring gap between corporate profits and earned incomes:

There's no "law of capitalism" that says that companies have to pay their employees as little as possible. There's no law of capitalism that says companies have to "maximize short-term profits." That's just a story that America's owners made up to justify taking as much of the company's wealth as possible for themselves.

Ironically, this short-term greed on the part of America's owners is likely reducing their long-term wealth: Companies can't grow profits by cutting costs forever, because their profits can't grow higher than their revenues. At some point, revenue growth needs to accelerate. But that won't happen until companies start sharing more of the wealth they create with the folks who create it — their employees.

- Michael Butler examines the readily foreseeable effects of the leaked CETA text in detail - with particular emphasis on its potential damage to Canadian health care.

- Finally, the Ottawa Citizen calls for a renewed investigation into Robocon in light of Michael Sona's conviction. And Lawrence Martin points out the most important question left unanswered by the finding that Sona was just one part of a larger scheme to defraud voters:

The term “vote suppression” is a euphemism. When a member or members of a political party run an operation to prevent citizens from voting for another party, it’s tantamount to trying to fix an election result. It’s attempted vote-rigging.

For corrupt political acts, you can’t get much worse. It’s certainly more egregious than abusing housing allowances or misusing government planes, the kinds of allegations that have brought down some prominent politicians lately.
...
So who else was there? Was the operation carried out with the knowledge or input of any of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s top lieutenants? Will we ever find out?

Mr. Sona, with whom I have had several conversations, did not testify at his own trial. But he is considering whether to come forward in coming weeks or months with what he knows about the whole sordid business. If it’s true that others were involved, he should name them.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Linda McQuaig discusses how a burgeoning wealth gap is particularly obvious when it comes to retirement security:

Quaint as it now seems, not long ago this was considered a good basic plan: Work hard all your life and then retire with a comfortable pension.

In recent times, a new plan has replaced it: Work hard all your life and then all bets are off.

The notion of retirement security in exchange for a lifetime of hard work — a central element in the implicit social contract between capital and labour in the postwar years — has been effectively tossed aside, as corporations have become more insatiable in their demands and governments have increasingly abandoned workers.
...
In what amounts to a radical overhaul, [the Con government] announced last April that it intends to change long-standing legislation governing workplace pensions in ways that would allow employers (private sector and Crown corporations) to walk away from pension commitments they made to employees, even after those employees have paid into the plans throughout their working years.
...
Workplace pensions were always expected to be a key part of that retirement security. Unlike many European countries, where public pensions were generous enough to serve as the centerpiece of a retiree’s income, the Canadian government kept public pension benefits low and encouraged workers to rely on workplace pensions.

That worked fine for those who were able to negotiate workplace pensions with an employer — generally those who had a union to represent them. In such cases, both the employer and the employees typically contributed to the plan, under terms that specified what benefits would be paid out to employees in their retirement.

Employers now want to be able to fundamentally rewrite the terms of those workplace pension deals so that, if the market plunges and the pension fund declines, the pay-outs will be less — in effect, shifting the risk from the company to the retiree.
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It’s striking, however, that a bold embrace of risk is only expected of those in the lower echelons of the corporate world. At the top, executives cling to old-world notions — like securing comfortable retirements.

- And Regina civic workers are taking action to make sure the city keeps its pension promises - rather than either demanding concessions now, or changing the rules so it can unilaterally slash benefits later.

- Brian Iler suggests that the Cons' charity crackdown could have been avoided if Canada adopted a definition of charity work which included promoting public debate on political issues. But while that change might have given current charities more confidence as to the result of the current round of government-directed audits, it wouldn't have done much to avoid the needless expense of going through the audit process in the first place.

- Meanwhile, Kaylie Tiessen is hopeful that Ontario is ready for a serious conversation about the need for more revenue to fund public services.

- Kayle Hatt studies the federal government's cuts to summer student programs. And CBC reports that Calgary's decision to outsource park maintenance work has led to temporary foreign workers taking the place of students who would otherwise be able to use a summer income to fund their education.

- Finally, the Ottawa Citizen identifies one of the surest signs of an ethically bankrupt government - while noting that the Harper Cons and Alberta's PCs are just two of the governing parties who seem to be treating that lack of ethics as a goal to be pursued:

There seems to be an epidemic in Canada of rogue staffers doing unethical things their political bosses would never, ever sanction.

The most famous is Nigel Wright, the former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who wrote a large cheque to a sitting senator. Then there’s the OPP search-warrant document alleging that David Livingston, the chief of staff for former Premier Dalton McGuinty, hired someone to purge emails during the transition to Kathleen Wynne’s premiership. There is the ongoing mystery about the voter-suppression phone calls in several federal ridings in 2011 “by a person or persons currently unknown to this court,” in the words of Federal Court Judge Richard G. Mosley.

Now there is a leaked, draft auditor’s report about former Alberta Premier Alison Redford, suggesting her staff manipulated airplane bookings so that she could treat the planes as personal limos.
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An ethical organization does not build plausible deniability into its hierarchies and relationships; it does not have any reason to. The fact that it seems to be built in to Canadian political culture, in more than one party, in more than one province, is sickening.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- John Myles discusses the Cons' war on evidence:

The mandatory Census was the lifeblood of almost all social and business planning. It provided key data for studying things like income inequality and poverty since both low- and high-income households were required to report. The quality of Census data and the accessibility of the data to non-government users had improved exponentially since the 1970s. As a result, its importance as a tool for monitoring the effects of government policy was on the rise. Because it collected data on such a large sample (20 percent) of Canadians, it was able to shed a light into dark corners of Canadian society that no other data source could do.

One of the most important functions of the Census was to monitor what was happening to Canadians over time. Are current governments doing a better or worse job than their predecessors? Breaking the Census series in 2011 means we can’t answer this question any longer. Transparency was the issue, and transparency lost.

But killing the mandatory census was not the only important entry point for data suppression. The 1990s were an important period of data innovation at Statistics Canada. Longitudinal studies – of children, young adults, and the labour force – were introduced. By the 2000s, Canadian researchers were just beginning to master the complex data these surveys produced on important questions such as the duration and consequences of poverty, unemployment, and the like. The longitudinal surveys are now gone, a result of budget-cutting.

- Lest we needed any explanation for the hostility, Daniel Tencer reports on Jim Stanford's findings that the Cons' actual record on jobs looks poor both on its face and in comparison to other governments around the world. And the Conference Board of Canada notes that temporary foreign workers spiked even as the number of jobless Canadians hit new highs, while Nicholas Keung reports that the Cons approved thousands of temporary foreign worker applications in positions where Canadians could plainly have been trained if employers weren't determined to drive down wages.

- Meanwhile, Michael Harris sees an inflated, cash-grabbing Mike Duffy as the definitive symbol of the Harper Cons. And the Ottawa Citizen has had enough of the Cons' publicly-funded propaganda.

- Bryce Covert finds that the rich don't feel "wealthy" if they have less than $5 million in assets. Many tears will surely be shed over the plight of the mere millionaire, particularly given the lavish lifestyle and social respect enjoyed by those struggling to make ends meed.

- Finally, Paul Hanley nicely summarizes Harald Welzer's take on consumer culture:

For pre-industrial craftsmen and their clients, the object was to create a specific object. The work was done once the product was completed and remuneration based on exactly that product.

Industrial production, on the other hand, is a system in which continuous work generates an essentially infinite series of products for the creation of surplus value, which is invested in the expansion of the product range in order to push the system's horizons toward infinity. Nothing is ever finished; the work never stops.

Work and money become the ends, the products and their production mere means.

Work becomes an unlimited, endless activity that does not have a specific, limited, product-related objective, but is dedicated to the ceaseless creation of value - consequently the never-ending production of "growth." Just as work becomes incessant, each stage in the sequence of life's events and every dollar in the bank becomes merely a preliminary to the next stage and the next dollar.

This is the root of the idea of limitless growth that is essential to furnishing the infinite universe of consumable objects.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Gerald Kaplan discusses how the privileges of power have contributed to the utterly callous response to the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion by Stephen Harper and Ed Burkhardt:

For me, of all Burkhardt’s outrageous statements nothing surpasses his public accusation that the train’s engineer, Tom Harding, was responsible for the disaster, suspending him without pay. Among the victims of the train derailment, Tom Harding must now be included.

In truth, of course, Burkhardt had no more clue than you or I or Lord Acton how the derailment happened and who might be responsible. Indeed, his own company policies have very pointedly been questioned. Yet he simply invented the culprit, because I suppose that’s what rich and powerful people are able to do.
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Prime Minister Harper is the other powerhouse who showed last week that he knows he can get away with just about anything. First, he named Pierre Poilievre as his new Minister of State for Democratic Reform, an oxymoron by any standard. Globe columnist Lawrence Martin describes Poilievre as “one of [Harper’s] most belligerent, thuggish, MPs”. Next to the Prime Minister himself, with his obsession about “enemies”, no member of this government has demonstrated contempt for the spirit of democracy more than Mr. Poilievre. As Lawrence Martin wrote, this was one of Mr. Harper’s well-known “in-your-face moves.”

Second, Mr. Harper appointed to the sensitive post of Canadian ambassador to Jordan (with responsibility to Iraq) one Bruno Saccomani, who until that moment was his bodyguard, or, more formally, the RCMP man who headed his security team.

It is surely not too much to expect a Canadian ambassador to know something about the complex world of diplomacy and all that entails. And if you’re being assigned to be our country’s chief representative in two turbulent countries in a dangerously volatile region, shouldn’t you have a soupcon of background in the area? Or is that just me?

- Meanwhile, Miles Corak points out the disturbingly tight relationship between family background and economic outcomes in the U.S. And while Canada serves for now as a contrast, it's well worth noting that the Harper Cons are doing their best to push us down the same path of walled-off wealth for a few and a precarious living for the rest.

- Paul Krugman highlights the dishonesty and anti-worker bias behind the Great Pension Scare. Which, needless to say, is presented a propos of nothing.

[Update: Let's add Doug J's take:

The war against public pensions reminds me of the Iraq War. Even if one accepts that there is/was a big pre-existing problem in either case, the constant stream of lies is troubling.]

- Also, the Cons make clear what happens to honest civil servants who allow truth to undermine their deliberately false talking points. 

- The Ottawa Citizen recognizes and laments the shameful exploitation of hungry First Nations Canadians for experimentation. Bernard Valcourt isn't so big on shame, and considers the matter closed by an apology for other monstrous attacks on First Nations culture.

- Finally, Susan Delacourt comments on why the Cons' departmental enemies lists may go far beyond politics as usual - particularly if information intended for government use only is being illegally loaded into CIMS for partisan purposes.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- The Ottawa Citizen asks whether Stephen Harper's Conservatives think Canadians are stupid enough to fall for their asinine carbon tax spin. Aaron Wherry confirms that the answer is an emphatic "yes".

- But then, we shouldn't be surprised to see the Cons unveiling ever more blatant distractions to try to call attention away from their continued contempt for democracy.

- The Star-Phoenix editorial board echoes Erin Weir's call to ban corporate and union donations to Saskatchewan political parties:

For a government that cites concerns about the undue influence unions have wielded over the decades on Saskatchewan labour legislation and has expressed annoyance with unionpaid ads that criticize its policies, it's a cynical stance to respond to Mr. Weir's proposal by saying, "We have no plans to change the current policy, which has been in place for many years under both NDP and Sask. Party governments."

Mr. Wall could well end up regretting poking a stick into this hornet's nest. Not only will it bring into sharper focus the policy choices being made by a governing party that's backed heavily by the corporate sector, but it also raises questions about the role of third-party advertising during writ periods. After all, if unions shouldn't be spending their members' money on political ads, what about corporations spending money from shareholders - among them mutual funds investing union members' pension money, for instance - for the same purpose?

Rather than remain the wild west of political party financing, with no limits on donations - even perennially conservative Alberta has a limit, albeit a whopping $30,000 per union or company during an election year, while Ontario's limit is $9,300 - Saskatchewan should act to put the control back in the hands of actual voters by eliminating corporate and union contributions.

- And finally, a new Ipsos Reid poll makes clear that Canadians don't want to hand over billions in free money to big pharma for the sake of closing a free trade agreement with Europe.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Kady points out that the Cons are back to their old tricks in trying to push as much committee work as possible behind closed doors.

- Susan Delacourt theorizes that the Cons are likely to use anger rather than fear as their basis for imposing cuts. I suspect the rhetoric will vary from issue to issue (and indeed the OAS message has been based squarely on the latter, echoing the Republican Social Security line that it's necessary to attack social programs in order to save them) - but it won't come as much surprise if the Cons' usual fabricated enemies are indeed on the receiving end of the worst of the slashing.

- The Ottawa Citizen recognizes that OAS is the wrong place to cut, while Andrew Jackson notes that Canadians in lower income groups aren't enjoying the lengthy retirements being cited by some as justification for raising the OAS eligibility age. Which means that when Brian Lee Crowley says "we" should all put off retirement, he doesn't have any interest in sharing the burden evenly with mere working stiffs. And indeed Crowley's entire column is an absolute howler to the effect that OAS somehow forces people to retire before they really want to.

- But if the Cons are confirming their desire to rob from the poor to give to the rich, then a few sources to highlight the gap such as economicinequality.ca should be an important addition to Canada's public debate.

- Finally, Christin Milloy points out an appalling regulation introduced by the Cons which would theoretically ban transgendered individuals from flying in Canada. Thankfully it doesn't seem to have been applied yet in practice - but if the best one can say for the Harper Cons is that nobody takes their bigoted and ill-advised decrees seriously, that's hardly a vote of confidence.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Frances Russell criticizes the Cons' latest attempts to stifle parliamentary accountability. And the Citizen can only scoff at Tony Clement's claim to be an advocate for open government:

What matters is whether government makes information available. The statistics from access-to-information requests suggest that less information is getting out under this government, not more. And the Conservatives' highly defensive position on such matters as the detainee documents, or who put "not" on an international-development funding document, has not increased Canadians' trust in their government.

Public servants and scientists are too scared to talk to reporters. Even communications staff want questions in writing, and some are slow to respond.

In fact, Clement himself has damaged his credibility by refusing to be candid about the funding decisions that were made under the guise of G8 legacy projects in his riding. It's a bit much for a minister so closely identified with a slush fund and with obfuscation to be the champion of open government.

- If there's any sure signal as to how ill-advised the Cons' corporate tax-slashing strategy is, just look at Neil Reynolds' latest - where Reynolds has to selectively cite the same pack of Republican presidential candidates seen as a "hodge-podge of marginal types" who are destroying their own party to find anybody else on the planet so obsessed with handing out money to the corporate sector, and even then finds himself offside against the front-runner.

- Meanwhile, a more reasonable take on the impact of corporate tax cuts comes from Glen Pearson:

Just this week the Government of Canada reduced the corporate tax rate. It stood at 21% in 2005 but is now a mere 15%. In the last two years the government has lost $11.5 billion in annual tax revenue because of the scaled reductions.

We are constantly being informed that such reductions are necessary to keep us competitive and our economy healthy. There are surely boatloads of money being made each and every year in Canada but the 99% can’t find it or get some kind of boost in their standard of living because of it.

- And the constant corporate tax slashing looks all the more unproductive in light of the revelation that those billions of free dollars haven't stopped employers from retrenching on pension funding - not to mention the attacks on workers from Stephen Harper's own poster employer.

- Finally, Alice presents a fascinating look at a poll carried out by Brian Topp for the NDP's leadership race.

Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Dan Gardner rightly points out how too much concentrated power and a refusal to take advice can lead to bad decisions. And sadly, our federal government serves as a classic case in point:

“Most of the time, taking advice benefits your accuracy,” notes Kelly See, associate professor of organization at New York University. “That’s because a lot of times there’s some error in your estimate. You may not know what that error is. You may be a little high, you may be a little low.” The same is true of other people’s judgments, but their errors are likely to be different, so if you pool the judgments the errors will tend to cancel each other out. “When you combine opinions, you usually get a more accurate decision, something that’s closer to the truth.”

This simple but important phenomenon is why the average guess of 20 people about the number of jelly beans in a jar is likely to be more accurate than any one guess. It’s why the average of many polls is likely to be more accurate than any one poll. And it’s why prediction markets usually do better at foreseeing outcomes than any one person, no matter how well informed that person is.

But it takes a certain humility to listen to others and seriously take their views into consideration. And power does not promote humility. Quite the opposite.

“We found that the more power the managers had, the more confident they were in their judgment, and the less their co-workers reported that they took advice,” See notes.
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I must admit the prime minister hasn’t invited me over to 24 Sussex to chat about decision-making and organizational theory. I am a distant observer. But I think some facts are clear.

He inherited a government that centralizes authority to a far greater extent than any other in the western world. And he made it more centralized. There is also no evidence — at least not any I am aware of — that the prime minister recognizes the danger confronting him and has taken steps to avoid it. He doesn’t disperse authority. Doesn’t consult widely and seek out contrary views. Shows not a glimmer of the self-doubt that is the best and final defence against hubris.

Now, you tell me. Should any leader be that powerful?

- Tim Harper and the Ottawa Citizen both deliver scathing indictments of the federal government's inaction on Attawapiskat in particular and First Nations living conditions in general.

- The provinces can apparently all agree on the need for federal action to curb sodium levels. But we can count on the Cons to once again side with childhood obesity if the alternative is any meaningful regulation.

- Finally, if it's worth criticizing any waste of money on a firearm-related program, the Cons' $214 million to euthanize a single moose would seem like a far more obvious target than the gun registry data the Cons are determined to destroy.

[Edit: fixed typo.]

Tuesday Evening Links

This and that to end your Tuesday.

- The Ottawa Citizen tears a strip off the Cons' G8 patronage and cover-up:

The more details emerge about the way the government funnelled money into the Muskoka region under the convenient category of "G8 legacy infrastructure," the more "smalltown cheap" the whole thing looks.
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In a sense, none of this money was theirs to spend. Parliament approved the funding under the mistaken impression that it was for border infrastructure.

In a larger sense, the government never had any business throwing public money around like this. Yes, municipalities were and are in sore need of a better model for infrastructure funding. But using an international summit as a tenuous excuse to create a oneoff, regional fund is not a good way to accomplish that goal. It's a good way to create the circumstances for cronyism and waste.

- And even Kelly McParland is less than impressed:

Now we discover, thanks to some innovative digging by the NDP, that Mr. Clement took personal command of the $50 million, setting up a command centre in his riding headquarters, creating a mini-council consisting of himself, the mayor of Huntsville and a local resort manager to sift through projects and pick the ones they liked. He convened meetings with area mayors to get input, dragged in bureaucrats from the Department of Foreign Affairs, Industry Canada, and Infrastructure Canada, and managed to avoid leaving a paper trail that might prove embarrassing if someone started poking their nose into his activities later.

Someone did start sniffing around — Auditor General Sheila Fraser — but even her formidable investigative skills missed the extent of what Clement was up to, or the fact he had the bureaucrats helping him out. And without supporting documentation, which seem be mysteriously absent, the Auditor General couldn’t tell whether projects were suitably chosen or not.

It’s not the way things are supposed to be done. The government isn’t supposed to just hand $50 million to a local MP and tell him to pick some projects for it. There’s red tape to be dealt with, and not all of it unnecessarily. There are standards and procedures to be satisfied when spending taxpayers’ dollars, and the whole Clement operation seems to have been organized to get around them.
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Cover-up. Slush fund, Secret committee. No paper trail. All we need is Howard Hunt, a hidden tape machine and a trail of dirty campaign tricks and we could have a real scandal here.

- And pogge reminds us that it isn't Tony Clement that nominally approved the Cons' G8 spending - meaning that John Baird has plenty to answer for as well.

- Aaron Wherry painstakingly lists the topics for which the Cons have claimed a mandate from May's election. But for a next step, let's note that multiple topics on the list (attacking Air Canada workers, slashing the civil service, and cutting search and rescue operations as prime examples) are issues which were mentioned approximately zero times as part of the campaign which the Cons claim to have provided them with that mandate.

- Finally, Joe Comartin signals that the NDP is looking to point out how the Cons' disdain for evidence and rational policy-making conflicts with the values of Canada's legal community:

Joe Comartin says the country’s lawyers and judges are “offended professionally” by the Harper government’s law-and-order agenda, which is prohibiting any changes to its mandatory minimum sentencing legislation.

“They find this offensive as lawyers,” the NDP justice critic told The Globe. “The evidence is overwhelming this is the wrong approach. ... [Lawyers are] just so offended that they are shifting the criminal justice system as dramatically as it should be. They are offended professionally the government would do this.”
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Lawyers at the CBA meeting were strong in their condemnation of the government’s tough-on-crime agenda, and its position on sentencing. And Mr. Comartin, a former defence lawyer, said past governments would consult with the legal profession if significant changes were being proposed. This one, he says, does not.
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He added that the NDP continues to oppose the proposed legislation, pushing prevention rather than punishment and “knowing this is the most effective way to protect our citizens.”

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- As quickly as the Fraser Institute churns out corporate propaganda, Sixth Estate responds - this time nicely debunking a report encouraging yet more giveaways to big pharma:

(T)here’s a glaring lie by omission in the summary for this document: although the Fraser Institute really wants you to know that we spend about the same amount as the Americans do on drugs, what they don’t think you need to know is that, according to their own numbers, we actually spend almost 21% less per prescription than the Americans do. So government controls work, if not as well as we might hope, and the Fraser Institute wants to get rid of them anyways.

Secondly, the most interesting thing about healthcare comparisons is that Canadian brand-name drugs cost half as much as in America, but our generic drugs cost twice as much. Both are due to government price controls: our government forces prices low on brand-name drugs, but also allows generic drugmakers to charge high prices. You might think the solution, if the goal is lower drug prices for consumers, is to impose lower price controls on the generic market, or even just to let it float freely, like the Americans do.

That’s not the Fraser Institute’s solution. They say if you completely deregulate the industry, then the drugmakers will drop the prices on generic drugs, but they’ll still respect the artificially low rates for brand-name drugs. This sort of economic wizardry is exactly why we should take the Fraser Institute and dump them into the sea — an economical solution because they’re already near the ocean.

- While Andrew Jackson points out that plenty of think tanks from across the political spectrum prefer an expanded Canada Pension Plan to the Cons' gift to the financial sector, Carol Goar sums up exactly why the Cons' choice makes no sense:

(The Cons' plan) is a second-best solution and a poor substitute for strengthening the Canada Pension Plan, which covers the entire working population, is mandatory for all employers and employees, has worked well for 45 years and is actuarially sound for the next 75 years.

The only problem with the Canada Pension Plan is that it doesn’t provide enough to live on. The average annual payout is $6,150 a year. Even when that is combined with Old Age Security — the universal payment to all Canadians over 65 — the average is just $12,100, which falls roughly $6,800 below the poverty line.

That was fine when it was a supplement to the workplace pensions that most families could count on a generation ago. But today, 11 million workers have no pension. Many have no retirement savings at all.

Academics, actuaries, nonbank economists, labour leaders and seniors have urged the government since the recession to expand the Canada Pension Plan. Polls show Canadians would be willing to increase their contributions to assure themselves and others a dignified retirement.

The Conservatives are offering a less comprehensive, less reliable alternative.

- The Ottawa Citizen decries the Cons' willingness to run billions of public dollars through a shredder for the sake of posturing on crime. And Daphne Bramham notes that the prison-industrial complex is making inroads in B.C. as a result.

- Finally, Mike Smith's take on how to get anything done at the municipal level is well worth a read.

On minimal influence

There's plenty to agree with in the Ottawa Citizen's criticism of the Cons' crime policies. But I have serious doubts about the assertion that Julian Fantino will push the Cons even further toward the side of fearmongering on crime ahead of libertarian principles of justice.

After all, the expectation that Fantino's arrival will change anything would seem to imply that there was actually room for the Cons toward the "tough on crime" posturing end of the spectrum. But can anybody name a point when the Fantino-free Harper government hasn't chosen the most extreme possible posture on a crime issue (rather than an issue unrelated to actual criminal justice like the census)?

The reviews are in

The Ottawa Citizen:

For many years now, constitutional experts and other political observers have lamented the concentration of power in the prime minister's office. They've warned, persuasively, that this concentration of power erodes Canadian democracy -- and it doesn't matter who the prime minister is or to which party he or she belongs.

Harper's arbitrary abuse of the power to prorogue has caused many Canadians to wake up and realize that all might not be well with our parliamentary system. Although the Governor General is in theory able to restrain prime ministerial power by denying a PM the right to use prorogation for partisan purposes, Canadians have discovered that in practice prime ministers do what they want.

Have the powers of the Governor General atrophied to the point they don't exist? Is this a good thing, in that the GG is unelected and shouldn't have real powers anyway? Then again, aren't the aides and minions in the PMO also unelected, yet wield more power than any legislator except the PM himself? Everyone in Ottawa has heard anecdotes of 20-something staffers from the PMO scolding senior cabinet ministers, and loving it. That can't be great for Canadian democracy, either.

What began as a debate revolving around an arcane term is turning into a much bigger and more interesting conversation.

Calling a hack a hack

The Ottawa Citizen starts off an editorial on First Nations issues by praising Con MP Rod Bruinooge for his supposed candour and honesty. But in the interest of furthering an open and honest discussion, let's take a look at just how far the Citizen has to stretch the facts to try to make the Cons look good.

Here's what the Citizen had to say about Bruinooge:

Conservative Manitoba MP Rod Bruinooge says that he's the kind of guy who calls a spade a spade. Judging by his comments about the Kelowna Accord, his penchant for candour is refreshing.

Mr. Bruinooge, in a scrum with reporters after his speech to the annual meeting of the Assembly of First Nations, called the Kelowna Accord an "expensive press release."

So just how candid was Bruinooge's message? Why, it's so honest and personal that it's taken word for word from his boss:

Fontaine was responding to a comment by parliamentary secretary Rod Bruinooge who, when asked by reporters why the government shelved the accord, said the arrangement was a mere public relations exercise by the Liberals before the last federal election. "The previous government made an election promise at the last hour," Bruinooge said. "This was later dubbed the Kelowna accord. ... There was no agreement. It was a press release."

The comments echo those made by Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Jim Prentice who recently referred to the accord as a "very expensive press release."

Needless to say, Deceivin' Stephen will be glad to know that at least one significant media outlet is so gullible as to accept Con talking points as "candour". But for those looking to evaluate the Citizen's credibility in assessing Bruinooge in particular and the issue of First Nations funding in general, the only available conclusion is that the Citizen isn't about to let the facts get in the way of its Con-friendly spin.