Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- David Leonhardt discusses how the U.S.' tax system has become definitively regressive, featuring this chart as to how the wealthiest few now pay a smaller share of their income than anybody else.

- Ann Pettifor highlights how society suffers when rentier capitalism is allowed to dictate our policy options. And Matthew Goodwin writes that in the UK - as here - voters are eager to see alternatives which result in a more democratic distribution of wealth and power.

- David Macdonald reminds us of the continued blight of child poverty in Canada three decades after Parliament voted unanimously to eradicate it. Laurie Monsebraaten reports on Campaign 2000's update on the state of poverty and inequality. And Yolande Cole takes note of new research showing that half of Calgarians are struggling to pay for basic needs such as food and shelter.

- Colin McClelland reports on BDO Dunwoody's latest survey showing the spread of precarity and personal debt. And Kevin Camichael notes that the Libs' and Cons' focus on targeting first-time homebuyers at the expense of everybody else will only stand to make matters worse.

- Finally, Kathy Tomlinson points out how the trucking industry is exploiting immigrants and endangering the public by charging fees to hire drivers with no regard for safety.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Paul Barratt discusses the results of a roundtable addressing inequality in Australia - with plenty of lessons worth keeping in mind elsewhere:

...(I)nequality is increasing significantly in Australia and, without a change in public policy, the problem will continue to worsen. Australia’s social security system is no longer adequate; it imposes unacceptable constraints on the growing numbers of people dealing with the consequences of poverty, unemployment, homelessness and general social disadvantage. Australia’s poor record on closing the gap between Indigenous and other Australians and between men and women is unacceptable. So is the inappropriate influence on policy decisions wielded by the corporate sector and those in the upper percentiles of wealth and income, and the failure of the current political structures to curb that influence.

The roundtable participants repeatedly drew attention to the inadequacy of the current economic model, its dependency on endless growth, its failure to engage with ecological and climate limits, and its assumption that unconstrained markets can respond to the need for the dignity and wellbeing of the whole population.
...
We all deserve basic human rights: food, clothing, shelter, education and modern healthcare. But we should aspire to go way beyond that, to be a genuinely intelligent and inclusive nation guided by an agreed set of national values.

It is time to reject the politically charged distinction between “lifters” and “leaners” that undermines our identity as a people committed to a fair go for all. The overwhelming majority of Australians want to have a job. They want to feel that it is a job that has meaning and they want to do it well. How productive they are depends not only upon how hard they are prepared to work but how well they are trained, how well they are led and managed, and what equipment they are furnished with.

In our wage fixation processes we need to reintroduce the concept of the living wage. We must recognise the benefits of investing in people’s education, vocational training, improved access to healthcare, public housing and a decent living standard for those who find themselves unemployed. Elimination of tax benefits like the capital gains tax discount and uncapped negative gearing against personal income, and an effective assault on multinational avoidance, could provide the wherewithal to tackle the problem.

- Matt Bruenig discusses three classifications of populist policies which can rebalance our economic structures, and notes that the three can and should be complementary to each other.

- Dawn Foster points out how social housing has been undermined in the UK by privatization and class segregation. And Joshua Schneyer and Andrea Januta report on the private operators who have turned housing for the U.S. military into a source of exorbitant profits for substandard accommodations.

- Peter Gosselin highlights how workers in their 50s and up are being pushed out of the jobs they thought would last until a standard retirement age.

- Lisa Naccarato reports on a push by Ontario doctors to ensure that migrants have access to needed health care.

- Finally, Kira Lerner discusses how deliberate confusion prevents American voters from seeing their choices reflected through elections.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Elizabeth Piper reports on Jeremy Corbyn's much-needed declaration that under a Labour government, the financial sector will serve the public rather than the other way around. And George Monbiot comments on the role the left needs to play in reversing the accumulation of wealth and power:

(O)nce you have money and property, you can use it to accumulate more money and property, taking an ever greater share of society’s wealth, through the harvesting of economic rent. By economic rent I mean charging people over the odds to use a non-reproducible resource over which you exercise exclusive control. Think, for example, of the ridiculous price we pay in the UK for train tickets, because the train companies have us over a barrel.

By this means, through no enterprise of their own, the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. This process has no natural limits. Eventually, as we’ve seen in the past, the very rich can capture almost the entire production of society.

At this point, the debt, destitution and unemployment that results can cause economic collapse: the Great Depression is a good example.

This predicament is not a perversity of the system. It is an innate characteristic. It is bound to work this way, unless there is a political movement capable of breaking the vicious circle of wealth accumulation.
...
The right will never break the power of patrimonial wealth, because the right exists to defend it. But the left, when it remembers what it’s for, exists to confront it.

During the 1940s, when the left was arguably at the peak of its power in mainstream politics, the top rate of income tax in the US rose to 94%, and in the UK to 98%. Economists today look back on these rates and describe them as irrational. They argue that the Laffer Curve suggests that governments raise no further revenue above a rate of about 70%. But this is to miss the point. The point of these taxes was not just to raise revenue, but to break the power of patrimonial capital, and the vicious circle of wealth accumulation and inequality.

- Meanwhile, Frances Ryan discusses how the UK's punitive system for social benefit recipients is doing nothing but adding gratuitous stress for people already struggling to get by.

- Mike de Souza reports on the National Energy Board's attempt to weed out staff for providing accurate information to the media. And Barry Saxifrage examines how continued expansion of the tar sands is utterly incompatible with any serious attempt to meet Canada's already-unambitious greenhouse gas emissions targets, while Marc Jaccard calls out Justin Trudeau's Orwellian attempt to claim we can only cut carbon pollution by increasing it.

- Finally, Daniel Leblanc reports on the parting message of retiring Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault - and particularly the reality that access to information isn't getting any better under the Libs than it was under the Cons. And de Souza notes that the Harper Cons' habit of muzzling federal scientists remains standard operating procedure under Trudeau.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Larry Elliott discusses how the stock market is reacting with disgust against rare good economic news for workers and the general public. Asher Schechter interviews Angus Deaton about the connection between monopolies, rent-seeking and burgeoning inequality. And Bill Kerry writes that we have ample reason to ask what use the rich are to society at large when their wealth is hoarded and sheltered.

- The Broadbent Institute lists the Filthy Five worst tax loopholes which cost Canada eleven figures worth of revenue every year for no discernible social benefit. And PressProgress zeroes in on the business entertainment loophole in particular.

- CBC reports on a new study finding that nearly a million Canadians skimped on food or other necessities of life in order to pay for prescription drugs, while 1.6 million took less than the medicine they were prescribed due to an inability to afford it.

- The Local reports on Germany's proposal to make public transport free in order to cut down on pollution from vehicle use.

- Finally, Gordon Laxer writes that it's long past time for Canada to extricate itself from NAFTA rules requiring it to continue producing and exporting dirty energy.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Stephanie Blankenburg and Richard Kozul-Wright comment on the rise of rent-seeking as a driver of stagnation and inequality. And George Monbiot argues that we shouldn't let our common wealth be used for the sole benefit of a privileged few:

A true commons is managed not for the accumulation of capital or profit, but for the steady production of prosperity or wellbeing. It belongs to a particular group, who might live in or beside it, or who created and sustain it. It is inalienable, which means that it should not be sold or given away. Where it is based on a living resource, such as a forest or a coral reef, the commoners have an interest in its long-term protection, rather than the short-term gain that could be made from its destruction.

The commons have been attacked by both state power and capitalism for centuries. Resources that no one invented or created, or that a large number of people created together, are stolen by those who sniff an opportunity for profit. The saying, attributed to Balzac, that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime” is generally true. “Business acumen” often amounts to discovering novel ways of grabbing other people’s work and assets.
...
Enclosure creates inequality. It produces a rentier economy: those who capture essential resources force everyone else to pay for access. It shatters communities and alienates people from their labour and their surroundings. The ecosystems commoners sustained are liquidated for cash. Inequality, rent, atomisation, alienation, environmental destruction: the loss of the commons has caused or exacerbated many of the afflictions of our age.
...
I’m not proposing we abandon either market or state, but that we balance them by defending and expanding the two neglected sectors. I believe there should be wages for carers, through which the state and private enterprise repay part of the subsidy they receive. And communities should be allowed to take back control of resources on which their prosperity depends. For example, anyone who owns valuable land should pay a local community land contribution (a form of land value tax): compensation for the wealth created by others. Part of this can be harvested by local and national government, to pay for services and to distribute money from richer communities to poorer ones. But the residue should belong to a commons trust formed by the local community. One use to which this money might be put it is to buy back land, creating a genuine commons and regaining and sharing the revenue...

A commons, unlike state spending, obliges people to work together, to sustain their resources and decide how the income should be used. It gives community life a clear focus. It depends on democracy in its truest form. It destroys inequality. It provides an incentive to protect the living world. It creates, in sum, a politics of belonging. 

- Meanwhile, Jim Stanford examines the impact of public-sector austerity, and finds that wage cuts for public servants lead to both wage suppression in all sectors, and overall economic stagnation.

- David Macdonald studies (PDF) the effects of income splitting in private corporations, and finds that 0.3% of Canadian households use a tax loophole whose gains go disproportionately to people making over $200,000 per year.

- Colleen Fuller discusses how the corporate sector has taken over Canada's health care system - particularly in British Columbia and other provinces which have been eager to sell off health provision to big business.

- Jenny Uechi reports that the response of corporate titans to the revelations as to how they pulled the strings in Christy Clark's B.C. Lib government is to claim that's how things should be. Meanwhile, Ross Marowits reports that the Trudeau Liberals are going along with SNC-Lavalin's self-serving plan to make sure that corporate criminality doesn't lead to meaningful consequences.

- Finally, Michael Geist writes that Bell is lobbying to turn NAFTA into a mechanism to attack consumers in the name of extreme copyright enforcement.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Sarah O'Connor examines the inconsistent relationship between job quantity and quality as another example of how it's misleading to think of policy choices solely in terms of the number of jobs generated. Angela Monaghan discusses how wages continue to stagnate in the UK despite a low unemployment rate. And Patrick Butler writes about the "relentless financial tightrope" which keeps far too many households from ever avoiding the stress of imminent ruin:

Low-income families are going without beds, cookers, meals, new clothes and other essential items as they struggle to cope with huge debts run up to pay domestic bills, according to a survey highlighting the cost-of-living crisis experienced by the UK’s poorest households.

Clients of the debt charity Christians Against Poverty (CAP) had run up an average of £4,500 in debts on rent or utility bills, forcing them on to what the charity described as a “relentless financial tightrope” juggling repayments and basic living costs, leaving many acutely stressed and in deteriorating health.

The pressure of coping with low income and debt frequently triggered mental illness or exacerbated existing conditions, with more than a third of clients reporting that they had considered suicide and three-quarters visiting a GP for debt-related problems. More than half were subsequently prescribed medication or therapy.
...
There are widespread concerns about rising pressure on living standards for low-income households as wages fall, working-age social security benefits remain frozen and inflation rises. The survey’s findings indicate that households are increasingly turning to high-cost credit to stay afloat, which CAP said was “an unsustainable solution”.

Nearly seven out of 10 clients helped by CAP in 2016 had fallen behind with payments for gas, electricity and rent, and 90% had taken out loans, run up overdrafts or used credit cards to meet domestic bills. There was a year-on-year increase in the proportion of clients using credit cards stay afloat, from 49% to 64%.

Damon Gibbons, director of the Centre for Responsible Credit, said: “Once again this report lays bare the human costs associated with debt problems. Debt affects health, including mental health; contributes to relationship breakdown; makes it harder to get back into and sustain employment, and has a host of negative impacts for children.

“With the continuing squeeze on household incomes and the failure of the Financial Conduct Authority to curb irresponsible lending resulting in greater indebtedness, we desperately need a national strategy to raise wages, restore the welfare safety net and provide better debt solutions.”

- G. Elijah Dann implores Canadians not to be taken in by Justin Trudeau's public relations schemes when they're being used in support of Trumpian policy. And Bob Baldwin and Richard Shillington examine how the Libs' retirement income changes may do nothing - or even be outright damaging - for low-income earners in particular.

- Brent Patterson highlights how the Libs are insisting on including corporate-biased dispute resolution provisions in trade deals even as our trading partners seek more balanced options. And Dean Beeby reports on Canada's role in facilitating tax evasion through lax disclosure requirements, while Canadians for Tax Fairness highlights how the federal government is rewarding tax haven users with public contracts.

- Meanwhile, Michael Hiltzik examines the role of tax cheating in exacerbating inequality. Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen and Gabriel Zucman discuss how global inequality is even worse than has previously been assumed once hidden wealth is included in the picture. And Robert E. Litan and Ian Hathaway comment on the U.S.' growing tendency toward rent-seeking rather than productive entrepreneurship.

- Finally, Andrew Sheng writes that our political and social systems have failed to keep up with an increasingly complex world.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Rutger Bregman writes that the most extreme wealth in our economy is based on rents rather than productivity:

In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we hail as “successful” and “innovative” are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about it. Even for politicians on the left, it’s a non-issue.

To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our “human capital” in economic terms) to create something new, whether that’s a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.

But there is also a second way to make money. That’s the rentier way: by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others’ expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.
...
What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers and ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more powerful.

Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society’s biggest freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through a system of, say, employee shares, or a universal basic income.

But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the old-fashioned faith in “solidarity” with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders of society’s strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.

- Nora Loreto reminds us of the potential for public-sector competition such as a postal bank to rein in the abuses of the private sector. And Joe Allen discusses the potential for the logistics sector to be a new organizing opportunity for workers.  

- Ilona Dougherty is rightly concerned with the prospect that an entire generation of workers is being told that it can't expect anything more than precarious work, while Murray Dobbin comments on the increasing stress and despair within the working class. Alexandra Sienkiewicz reports on the abuse of "part-time" classifications to suppress wages and benefits. And Frank Graves and Graham Lowe discuss what we'd see in workplaces which were actually intended to be smarter - rather than merely being more exploitative.

- Meanwhile, Jonathan Malesic argues that the U.S. shouldn't tie personal dignity solely to paid employment.

- Finally, Michael Harris writes about the slow-motion train wreck that is the Cons' leadership campaign.

Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your long weekend reading.

- Marc Jarsulic, Ethan Gurwitz, Kate Bahn and Andy Green comment on how corporate monopoly power and rent-seeking produce disastrous public consequences:

Income inequality is rising, middle-class incomes are stagnant, and much of the current economic policy debate is centered on finding ways to counter these trends. A renewed focus on antitrust enforcement could make a significant contribution toward accomplishing this goal.

When firms with dominant market power are able to elevate the prices they charge and earn supra-normal returns—which are economic rents—they simultaneously lower the real incomes of those who buy from them. In other words: The seller benefits when market power elevates the price of hospital care or raises the price of an airline ticket, but the buyer has less income for other needs. Moreover, the tendency of monopolies to restrict output combined with reduced competitive pressure to invest can translate into reduced employment.
...
(T)here is systematic evidence—ranging from the disconnect of corporate profits and corporate investment to evidence of persistent supra-normal profitability—that points to an increase in rent extraction in the U.S. economy. And while large rent extraction is a primary outcome of unchallenged market power, there are additional and equally undesirable results. For example, the entry of new firms in the market can be blocked; innovation can be stifled; product quality can be degraded; the prices paid to workers and suppliers can be reduced; and influence with government officials can be increased.

- And as part of the CCPA's Monitor issue on the state of Canada's media, Fenwick McKelvey examines the need to make a diverse range of content available rather than allowing large providers to fully define and limit which options can easily be discovered.

- Paul Willcocks points out there's no evidence-based reason for concern that a higher minimum wage will affect the availability of jobs. And PressProgress notes that the corporate interests trying to shout down any improvements to the minimum wage are the same ones trying to use exploitative immigration schemes to lower wages for all workers.

- Michael Laxer highlights how the manufactured problems at Canada Post - with consistent profits deemed insufficient without explanation in order to attack working conditions, and plans for a postal bank which would both raise profits and provide an important public service given short shrift - are only part of the wider hostility against the public sector. 

- Finally, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group sets out the gross deficiencies in the Libs' plans for a security review committee even from the standpoint of basic oversight - to say nothing of the underlying lack of action to protect civil rights from a pervasive surveillance state.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- thwap highlights the cycle of austerity, stagnation and decline that's marked the past few decades across much of the developed world. And Thomas Walkom recognizes that the economy is actually one of the Cons' most glaring weaknesses - at least, if one thinks that workers count for anything:

The truth is that Canada’s economy is not doing well. Official unemployment may be hovering around the 7 per cent mark (last month it was 6.9 per cent). But official unemployment figures do not take into account those who are underemployed or who have simply given up looking for work.

As United Steelworkers economist Erin Weir notes, the proportion of Canadian adults with jobs is no better now than it was in 2009, during the worst of this recession.

Which is another way of saying that job growth under this government hasn’t kept up with population growth.
...
(T)he world is also going through a long cyclical slump, one in which consumers don’t have money to spend and businesses are afraid to invest. In this kind of world, Ottawa’s focus on fiscal austerity — on pulling government money out of the economy — only makes matters worse.

Second, the government is systematically taking aim at anything, from employment insurance to unionization, that keeps wages up. The Dickensian notion here is that full employment can be achieved only if most of us are willing to work for peanuts.

...
For Harper, all of this is shaping up as a major political problem. The economy is not improving significantly. Eventually, voters will begin to assign blame.

- But then, unpaid work certainly seems to be burgeoning under the Cons (with help from provincial governments who don't address the spread of unpaid internships). And Andrew Cash is working to ensure that employers can't exploit students as unpaid labour.

- Ross Gittins discusses the rise of rent-seeking in Australia - and the zero-sum game of having all kinds of corporate actors lobbying for preferential treatment.

- Finally, pogge is rightly critical of the combination of secret proceedings and non-disclosure when people are branded as suspected terrorists under Canada's security certificate system.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Linda McQuaig highlights how attacks on workers are used to distract attention from the systematic transfer of wealth to those who need it least:

As long as the right can keep workers envious and suspicious of each other, the focus won't be on those at the top, where the benefits have actually gone. As Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney noted last week, corporations are sitting on $500 billion in cash, reflecting the growing share of business revenue in recent years that has gone to profits, not wages.

(Labour's share of Canada's national income has fallen from 65 to 60 per cent since 1990, partly because of policies like privatization and deregulation, the OECD's Employment Outlook reported last month.)
...
(W)hile public sector workers are bullied these days, business leaders are treated as semi-gods.

Since the Conservatives took power, business leaders have enjoyed a two-day private retreat with the finance minister each summer, just in case they hadn't already managed to communicate their views to him at other private functions, not to mention through the pages of the newspapers they own.

The business leaders used their retreat last summer to urge Jim Flaherty to adopt measures to reduce workers' pay and to implement U.S.-style right-to-work laws aimed at limiting union power, according to government documents reported in the Globe and Mail earlier this month.

So while the economy remains stalled with business leaders declining to invest their surplus $500 billion, we're encouraged to vent our anger by firing city garbage workers and making sure we catch every one of those napping TTC collectors.

- And Mike Lofgren comments on how the new plutocracy is using the distraction to try to insulate itself entirely from society at large:

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained. I discussed this with a radio host who recounted a story about Robert Rubin, former secretary of the Treasury as well as an executive at Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. Rubin was being chauffeured through Manhattan to reach some event whose attendees consisted of the Great and the Good such as himself. Along the way he encountered a traffic jam, and on arriving to his event—late—he complained to a city functionary with the power to look into it. “Where was the jam?” asked the functionary. Rubin, who had lived most of his life in Manhattan, a place of east-west numbered streets and north-south avenues, couldn’t tell him. The super-rich who determine our political arrangements apparently inhabit another, more refined dimension.

To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands—meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy. 

- Meanwhile, Purple Library Guy aptly points out that an increasingly complex economy provides nothing but opportunities for the unscrupulous to ensure that what we don't know benefits them at our expense:

My suspicion is that every increase in social complexity provides greater opportunity for corruption--for elements of that society to extract wealth without making a contribution, and without it being generally recognized. For parasitism, if you will. Furthermore, in any hierarchical society, whatever the general impacts of complexity, a point will be reached at which increased complexity loses more than it gains in terms of general prosperity or productivity. Past this point each addition of complexity allows more siphoning of wealth by parasites than it allows of wealth creation. In fact, I would suggest that as complexity increases the chance becomes larger and larger that any given new complexity increase will be introduced precisely for the purpose of more effective parasitism rather than for any improvement in wealth creation. Not that this will be admitted.
...
The world crisis we hit in 2007-ish and which in my opinion is only in temporary delay at the moment ultimately is a systemic one which goes beyond specifics of globalized production, offshored jobs, or even financialization of the economy. Ultimately, what we have is a hierarchical system which has been allowed to grow in complexity until parasitism is so easy to do (far easier than wealth creation) and so difficult to interfere with, that the system has begun to collapse. Measures to fix it, at least those introduced from above, will generally be some sort of increase in complexity; under the circumstances, the chances that despite all rhetoric the real results and even aims of such measures will be to increase the scope of parasitism still further are extremely high. So we're hooped, and any "solutions" they introduce will almost certainly just make things worse. In this sense I think the internationalist slogan that we're not against globalization we just want a different kind is probably misguided, or at least drastically overstated. I really am against globalization, and instead of trying to create one big worldwide struggle to try to compete with the globalizers' worldwide movement of money and production, I'd rather just stop them from moving the production in the first place and for that matter, keep the money and ownership out of their paws in the first place. No worker-owned factory is going to decide to put themselves out of a job by moving production to Indonesia.

- Finally, both Gareth Perry and Paul Dechene make the case for Saskatchewan citizens to speak up about the glaring need for federal boundary revisions.