Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Jasmine Kerrissy and Judith Stepan-Noris examine the state of the U.S. labour movement for Labour Day. And Gil McGowan points out the many basic freedoms which are lacking for Canadian workers and their unions.

- Alex Himelfarb writes about the politics of inflation - and particularly the deliberate effort to allow profits to rise while suppressing any associated improvement in wages. And Ted Johnson discusses the significance of even modest student debt relief in making clear that working people can benefit from public policy choices.

- Jeremy Clifton and Nicholas Kerry study the values which best map to political ideology, and find that the most important dividing line is not based on fear (as often assumed) but the acceptance of hierarchy and inequality. And Ariel Kalil et al. find that welfare restrictions driven by both neoliberal and conservative politicians served to exacerbate those factors by preventing parents living in poverty from providing needed emotional support to their children.

- Kevin Rennert et al. find that our current estimates of the social cost of carbon - though far higher than the prices set by public policy - are themselves far short of sufficient to account for the damage wrought by carbon pollution. And Megan Rowling reports on the prospect of a rapid transition if only the money currently spent on fossil fuel subsidies is instead put into a clean economy. 

- Finally, Kate Aronoff writes about Mississippi's example of eco-apartheid, while the Economist's review of two new books points out the imminent reality of large number of climate refugees from around the globe.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Deborah Gleeson discusses how inequality in vaccine availability is making new variants an inevitability, while Joseph Stiglitz and Lori Wallach write that an intellectual property waiver is a must to ensure vaccines are available around the globe. And Rachel Cohen warns that the same issue looks to be developing when it comes to new COVID treatments. 

- Phil Tank reports on Nazeem Muhajarine's well-placed criticism of the Moe government's incomplete holiday advice. And CBC News reports on the Saskatchewan Party's truly destructive choice to require parents to be present for COVID vaccinations in schools, sending a message to anti-vaxxers that their cultivated distrust is a higher priority than public health. 

- Meanwhile, Anna Salleh writes that the pandemic has exposed the importance of ensuring improved indoor air quality at all times - while noting the reluctance of governments to actually make the effort to do so. 

- Marc Lee notes that even if the pollution caused by the burning of natural gas is offshored, fossil fuel production is the main obstacle to British Columbia meeting its emission reduction targets.

- Claudia Horn and Isadoro Cardoso write about the climate justice movement which is trying to push for progress even as corporate-influenced governments fail miserably. Mitchell Beer notes that a majority of oil industry workers would be happy to transition out of the sector. And Stephen Maher writes that any meaningful fight over the existence of carbon pricing in Canada should finally be over. 

- Meanwhile, Drew Anderson exposes the pitiful attempt of Alberta's tar sands operators to brand their environmental devastation and carbon pollution as "beautiful". And Mark Kaufman discusses the history of the industry's PR efforts to block any systemic progress against climate change - including the sham of substituting individual carbon footprints for discussion of industrial pollution. 

- Finally, Robert Kuttner makes the case that the excesses of corporate control have left us with a choice between capitalism which subjugates the population as a whole, and individual liberty protected by a social-democratic economy which limits corporate power. 

Saturday Afternoon Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Toby Sanger asks who really bears the risk when governments agree to hand over billions to the private sector through P3 arrangements:

While Canada may be one of the leaders in the market for P3s, we’re far from a leader when it comes to transparency, assessment and accounting for P3s.   P3s are already a murky business when it comes to financial transparency—and we’re close to the bottom of that pool.  The value for money assessments used to justify P3s in Canada are simply not credible for a number of reasons...

All the Canadian P3s I’ve seen in the past decade or so have been justified on the basis that they transfer large amounts of risk to the private sector.   This is also what U of T professor Matti Siemiatycki and Naeem Farooqi found when they analyzed all the P3s conducted by Infrastructure Ontario for an article published in the prestigious Journal of the American Planning Association last year.  Every single P3 project was justified on the basis of Value for Money assessments that claimed P3s transferred large amounts of risk from the public to the private sector.

The average amount of risk calculated for these projects was almost half (49%) the base project costs.   For some projects, the value of the “risk” calculated amounted to over 80% of the base project cost, averaged over $100 million for each of the 28 projects and over $3 billion in total.  That’s a lot of money, no matter how you count it.   Just to be clear: not one of these P3s would be justified on the basis of the central Value for Money assessments without this assumption that large amounts of risk were transferred to the private sector.  And Ontario isn’t unique: P3s in other provinces are also justified on the basis they transfer large amounts of risk to the private sector. (see note #2 below).

But how is this risk calculated?   They don’t say.   The value for money risk assessment templates Infrastructure Ontario provides are frankly embarrassing from a public policy perspective, especially for decisions that have involved billions of dollars of the public’s money.  There’s no evidence provided for any of the numbers proposed in their risk matrix—and other provinces are no better.  The value for money assessments release for each P3 project are superficial window dressing that provide none of the details necessary for an independent assessment.    And in the instances where auditors have reviewed the actual finances of P3s, they’ve generally always found that the project would have cost less if it were publicly financed and not run as a P3.

...

But no matter how complicated—and secret—these key calculations of risk transfer for P3s are, none I’ve seen acknowledge a crucial fact: the real risk the private sector assumes through a P3 is limited by the net amount of unsecured money they have put into the project.  This amount is represented by the equity they provide and any net cash they have committed, less funds received. The initial equity share of the cost of P3s is usually no more than 10-15% and sometimes as low as 8% or less.   Since P3s are invariably set up as “special purpose vehicles” (SPVs), the big companies behind them can simply walk away if they aren’t making enough profit or if things go wrong, thanks to limited liability laws for corporations.  The maximum they lose is any equity and any net cash they’ve put in, less what they’ve been paid.   And a number of P3 companies have abandoned their projects, or used the threat of doing so to get more money out of the government.

 - Scott Stelmaschuk highlights how inequality undercuts the foundation of any meaningful concept of self-determination - while being readily reduced if we make a collective determination to do something about it. And Rick Smith notes that we have no reason to be satisfied with the structural disparities as matters stand now.

- Josh Wingrove reports on the latest abuses of the temporary foreign worker program - featuring the Harper Cons arguing that they're helpless to so much as inform provinces of TFWs working in their jurisdiction based on the belief that workers should be free to be exploited by their employers in total secrecy:

However, provinces say the federal government isn’t sharing detailed information about the workers. It means that provincial workplace safety inspectors can’t proactively enforce labour laws, because they don’t know who the workers are or where they’re working.

“It’s for us to know where these workers are, so that we can make sure their rights are being protected,” Ontario Labour Minister Yasir Naqvi said, adding the province had been pushing for more information for four years.
...
It was a request echoed by several ministers, and Dr. Leitch said she would push to improve information sharing, saying privacy issues are among the barriers.

 - Finally, Marc Mayrand shares his take on how to get younger citizens more involved in our political system.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that to end your weekend.

- Dave Coles introduces readers to the Cons' latest attack on labour - with a backbencher's private member's bill again serving as an excuse to introduce unprecedent restrictions on union organization.

- Michael Harris suspects that the Cons' attempt to delay any public review of their burgeoning Senate slush fund scandal by a referral to the Auditor General is doomed to fail. And Karl Nerenberg discusses exactly what the slush fund means - including the holes it highlights in Canada's party financing system.

- Martin Regg Cohn rightly calls out Jim Flaherty for once again trying to use a federal cabinet post to bully Ontario's provincial government. But it's also worth noting that in addition to misrepresenting the type of policy under consideration in Ontario, Flaherty is also being dishonest about the rationale used to sell his own party's tax cuts - which included generating tax room to be available for additional provincial revenue:

Our government firmly believes that unanticipated surpluses, the last area I wanted to mention, should be used primarily to reduce the debt and reduce federal taxes rather than to launch new policies in areas where the federal government is not best placed to design or deliver programs.

This, in turn, creates tax room that provinces and territories can consider filling for their specific needs and purposes. It supports the premise that governments need to be accountable to Canadians for their taxing and spending decisions. That clarity of roles and responsibilities is essential by ensuring that Canadians can hold governments accountable for their actions.

- Michael Geist discusses his appearance in front of the Standing Committee on International Trade to discuss the most dangerous elements of the TPP - as well as the secrecy surrounding its negotiations:

(I)t is deeply troubling that DFAIT has established a secret insider group with some companies and industry associations granted access to consultations as well as opportunities to learn more about the agreement and Canada's negotiating position.

I realize that Minister Fast denied the existence of such a group when he appeared before you last month.  However, documents I obtained under the Access to Information Act indicate that the first secret industry consultation occurred weeks before Canada was formally included in the TPP negotiations in a November 2012 consultation with telecommunications providers. All participants were required to sign non-disclosure agreements.  

Soon after, the circle of insiders expanded with the formation of a TPP Consultation Group. Representatives from groups and companies such as Bombardier, the Canadian Manufactures and Exporters, Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance, and the Canadian Steel Producers Association all signed a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement that granted access to "certain sensitive information of the Department concerning or related to the TPP negotiations."

I have copies of the signed NDAs here that make specific reference to the TPP Consultation Group.

The creation of a secret TPP insider group suggests an attempt to shy away from public consultation and scrutiny of an agreement that could have a transformative effect on dozens of sectors at a time when we should be increasing efforts to gain public confidence in the talks by adopting a more transparent and accountable approach. I believe the TPP's highly secretive and non-transparent approach runs counter to Canadian values of openness and accountability. We should be actively encouraging participants to increase TPP transparency and should lead by example by ceasing the two-tier insider approach to trade agreement information. 

- Finally, Will Hutton discusses why tolerance is of limited value without some associated commitment to human dignity:

Tolerance of other people's differences is a core element of a liberal order, but a good society is one where we go beyond just shrugging our shoulders at someone's sexual preferences, religious beliefs or ethnicity. It is one in which we engage with each other, create law and justice as a moral system enshrining human dignity and accept mutual responsibilities. The aim is to live with dignity, to be able to make the best of one's capabilities and to expect that the consequences of undeserved bad luck – what Dworkin called brute bad luck – would be compensated by society in a mutual compact. This is a million miles from the Economist's arid conception of liberalism.

Nor are these disputes just airy-fairy differences between intellectuals – they go to the heart of how we live, what we do and say. Unless we take a much more robust and rounded view of liberalism, tolerance ends up as indifference, disengagement and refusal to respect other people's ambition to live with dignity. Anything goes...

In successive areas of public policy – "reform" of criminal justice and legal aid, the health service, climate change, employment law, social security – the debate is similarly defined wholly in terms of the need to assert individual rights and choice, to minimise social and public responsibilities and, above all, to roll back taxes. If the facts or scientific evidence do not support this drive, then the facts are changed or the science ignored.
...
(I)if the right is dominant, a rounded liberalism has one advantage. The right's world leads to economic stagnation, social atomisation and a destructive nationalism. Nor, ultimately, is there happiness and dignity to be found by living as a tax-avoiding, climate-change-denying anti-feminist while mouthing how tolerant you are. There is a quiet and mounting crisis in conservatism. Liberalism, in its best sense, could capitalise on the opportunity. It is a pity Ronnie Dworkin won't be around to be part of the fight back. We'll just have to do it by ourselves.

On monstrous effects

One of my personal favourite villains in political theory is the "utility monster".

In response to the utilitarian theory that we can simply sum up citizens' preferences to determine what policies should be pursued, one of the most obvious counterarguments is to ask what happens when a single person puts so much weight on his or her own happiness that it fundamentally distorts any policy calculations. Taken to extremes, the hypothetical creature forces any utilitarian calculus to produce a distribution of benefits that's quickly and easily rejected as fundamentally unfair - with all other interests being subordinate to the utility monster's whims.

Of course, the very idea is preposterous. Ludicrous. Utterly apart from reality.

With just one problem: can anybody say with confidence that our economic policy-making does anything but to encourage exactly that type of distortion?

A mere 29 finance and resource corporations are now capturing close to a majority of all of the net corporate profits in Canada. And our policies are based on shoveling ever more money into their coffers, relying on the theory that their already-massive profits make them more likely to be able to run up the score even further in the future.

And an increasing proportion of individual wealth is similarly becoming more and more concentrated - with that process again defended through the suggestion that we should want to pour money into the hands of people who have proven both their dedication and their aptitude in pursuing wealth for its own sake, since it results in a higher society-wide number (however unfairly distributed).

In other words, our policies are devoted toward the perpetual pursuit of an aggregate measure of economic outcomes - with no regard for either the harmful effects of inequality which are exacerbated by that narrow focus, or the dangers of incentivizing the creation of ever larger and greedier wealth monsters.

So if we can see why the utility monster serves as a compelling argument against pursuing pure aggregate utilitarianism as a matter of political theory, shouldn't it be obvious that it's an equally damning indictment of what's become far too widely accepted as conventional economic wisdom?

[Edit: fixed wording, added label.]

On legacies

John picks up on Scott Adams' question about "legacy systems", and has some useful examples of areas where it would be a plus to effectively start policy development from scratch. But while I tend to agree with John's ideas, it's worth highlighting a crucial distinction that Adams seems to miss:

One of the biggest problems with the world is that we're bound by so many legacy systems. For example, it's hard to deal with global warming because there are so many entrenched interests. It's problematic to get power from where it can best be generated to where people live. The tax system is a mess. Banking is a hodgepodge of regulations and products glued together. I could go on. The point is that anything that has been around for awhile is a complicated and inconvenient mess compared to what its ideal form could be.

My idea for today is that established nations could launch startup countries within their own borders, free of all the legacy restrictions in the parent country.

What Adams seems to overlook is that many of the most problematic "legacy systems" (the "entrenched interests" blocking action on global warming, the lobbyists and their benefactors pushing for tax exemptions and regulatory loopholes, etc.) are private actors rather than public ones, and would face no restriction in their ability to operate across borders. That means that their resources built up elsewhere would undoubtedly be applied in any "startup countries" from day one, ensuring that any new systems would be developed around their interests. And in the absence of any countervailing forces, it's all too likely that they'd end up being able to turn any untilled soil into an even more tilted (if perhaps less complex) playing field than the one which Adams is seeking to improve.

Which leads to a more general philosophical point which should be particularly salient based on recent experience, whether it's the Harper Government of Vandals shredding whatever it can get its hands on or the Wall government's all-out attacks on the labour movement. As we sort out the nature of progressivism and seek to apply it, part of our theory needs to ensure that whatever progress we make is durable enough to withstand even the most antagonistic of future governments. And that means encouraging the development of positive "legacy systems" as counterweights to the interests which would otherwise crowd out all other voices.

Defining Progressivism

As promised, let's start looking at what exactly it is that Canadian progressives should be striving for. I'll start by noting a few current theories which seem to have some useful points to contribute, but which on their own look to fall short of a fully satisfactory explanation.

First off, Paul Rosenberg offers a rough definition that may find particular appeal as a Conservative government takes a wrecking ball to the most reliable source of information about Canadians:

I think that the primary difference between conservatives and progressives is that:

Conservatives believe in tribally-shared narrative myths that comfort them in perpetuating a world of inequality, while

Progressives believe in a universalist, critical-empirical approach to creating a world that works for everyone.

One can say that Rosenberg's definition makes for a useful inversion of the comedic trope that reality has a liberal (progressive) bias: can we get anywhere in making that true by definition by framing progressivism as the desire for policy based on empirical fact?

Not surprisingly, Rosenberg himself recognizes that this division doesn't tell the whole story. But I'd go a step further and note that it leaves the most important work undone: the question of how to define "a world that works for everyone" has to be the most important step in discussing progressive values. And indeed one of the greatest failures of the past few decades seems to me to have been progressives' willingness to accept conservative-friendly definitions of overall goals based on the availability of simple measuring sticks (e.g. prosperity defined in terms of total GDP) that's driven public policy in the wrong direction.

Which segues nicely into Alex Himelfarb's initial post on the nature of progressivism:

(M)y sense nonetheless is that the notion of “progressive” does have meaning, if only a belief that government’s role is not just to stop bad things from happening or to correct them when they do, but to help make good thinks happen, to promote human dignity, solidarity in diversity, and equality of opportunity, and to help ordinary people manage change in the face of broad global forces we don’t control. Progressives also give greater focus to government’s role in “correcting” the market, particularly with respect to the environment and poverty, and generally harnessing the market for people’s well-being, and are internationalists in the pursuit of Canada’s interests and committed to fulfilling our responsibilities as global citizens.

Unfortunately, Himelfarb is probably dead on target in trying to describe how progressivism is perceived. But there are two problems with the definition as a matter of setting out durable progressive ideals.

First off, there's the acceptance of global market trends as primary and all other matters - including democratic government - as being merely a means of tinkering around the margins to mitigate its worst excesses. That strikes me as conceding far too much in theory to the notion that citizens lack power to chart their own course, both individually and collectively. But perhaps more importantly (particularly to the extent it's intended as a response to what is rather than a definition of what might be), Himelfarb's definition also seems to present a rather weak defence of government, and a nonexistent defence of other forces needed as a matter of political realism to counterbalance the massive corporate power that actually does exist.

Second, there's the incrementalist nature of Himelfarb's definition which leaves out any particular end goals. If the nature of progressivism is to be slightly more concerned with the environment, poverty and other issues than the alternative, what exactly do we hope to accomplish on those points? (And I consider this more than just a theoretical exercise: in order to actually inspire public support, I'd argue that we need to be able to set out a long-term vision as to where we want to end up, not limit ourselves to fighting defensively on the current political landscape.)

A third effort at framing the political ideal (and last one I'll deal with in this post) is that of George Lakoff, contrasting a "strict father" conservative worldview with a "nurturing mother" progressive one. And there isn't much doubt that Lakoff's language looks to be a useful tool in linking progressive ends to familiar concepts.

But while Lakoff's framing is valuable in putting together talking points to discuss progressive policies, it looks to fall somewhat short in defining what those policies ought to be.

Again, part of that stems from the lack of specificity in Lakoff's framework. "Nurturing" is as much a means as an end, and like Rosenberg's focus on empiricism Lakoff's frame leaves open the question of what ends we're supposed to be pursuing. But there's also some conflict between Lakoff's and Rosenberg's respective priorities where the former would seem to lose out to the latter in a way that illustrates the limits of the "nurturing" model where the state is concerned.

For example, while I'd think it can safely be said that progressives don't agree with the gratuitous incarceration of criminals where the cost to society outweighs the benefit in doing so, I'd think it's equally fair to say that we want our levels of law enforcement and punishment to be based on evidence as to how to balance the costs and benefits of incarceration, not an overarching principle of attachment to the convicted individual as might be associated with an actual "nurturing mother". In effect, even if we see "nurturing" as a plus generally, the state can't be expected to develop and administer the level of attachment with each of its citizens that a mother would with her child - and that limitation needs to be considered when we decide how far to take the theme in defining ourselves as progressives.

So if it isn't enough to classify progressives as skeptical, nurturing incrementalists, what more do we need to add or take away from that picture to get to the right definition? Stay tuned...