Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Remembrance Day reading.

- Roderick Benns interviews Robin Boadway about the results of past basic income studies which have shown that economic security helps rather than hinders individual participation in the workforce:

Benns: What about a basic income guarantee makes it a social justice issue?

Boadway: To me, freedom from poverty and satisfactions of basic needs are fundamental human right. They are also a prerequisite to participating meaningfully in society. As well, as I have mentioned, those of us who are more affluent than average owe our success in good part to luck rather than merit: where and when we were born, our native abilities, our family backgrounds, the opportunities made available to us, and so on. We owe it to the less fortunate to share our good fortune.

Benns: The most common concern is about implementing a basic income guarantee is that too many of us would choose not to work. Why do you believe this won’t be the case?

Boadway: Evidence from guaranteed basic income experiments indicates that those who receive basic income grants do not squander it. Some use it to provide better outcomes for their children. Others use it to support improving their own skills. Very few simply become idle and live off the grant. This is not surprising. Basic income is not designed to give recipients a luxurious life. There will always be a desire to earn income over and above the basic income guarantee level in order to achieve personal and family fulfilment. Existing welfare programs are not good indicators of behaviour under a basic income. They are rife with stigmatization and impose strong penalties to work and save. To the extent that one worries about disincentive effects, it is possible to design the system so that recipients retain an incentive to undertake productive activity, including work, entrepreneurship and education. Moreover, one cannot underestimate how social norms can be influenced by a well-designed and non-intrusive basic income system.

- Meanwhile,  Ken Battle, Sherri Torjman and Michael Mendelson make the case that Canada's federal government needs to get serious about fighting poverty, including by implementing a basic income. And Nick Hanauer and David Rolf also weigh in on the importance of individual economic security to allow people to make meaningful and positive choices.

- On the bright side, CBC reports that Alberta's NDP government has wasted no time in establishing a new child benefit to reduce poverty for that province's parents.

- But George Monbiot points out that the UK Conservatives represent just one example of a right-wing government with no clue how cuts to social programs affect the communities they're supposed to represent.

- Finally, Samara Canada offers (pdf) a first thorough review of Canada's 2015 election.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Dennis Howlett reminds us that we can raise enough money to strengthen our social safety net merely by ensuring that a relatively small group of privileged people pays its fair share. And Seth Stephens-Davidowitz examines the glaring nepotism which festers in the absence of some policy counterweights.

- But Robert Kuttner offers seven reasons why the 99% keeps losing on policy grounds despite having the obvious theoretical ability to ensure reasonable political outcomes. In a similar vein, Sean McElwee discusses the connection between racism and poverty politics in the U.S.

- Meanwhile, Samara's report card reminds us that Canada too has plenty to improve in ensuring representative and connected government, while Jordon Cooper points out some particularly egregious examples of pandering and spin from all three levels of government.

- Ashley Renders reports on the World Bank's recognition that it's both possible and necessary to decouple economic development from pollution and climate change. And Kai Nagata recognizes that we shouldn't see a liveable natural environment as a matter of partisanship or ideology.

- But Jordan Press writes that while the Cons were warned against eliminating environmental criteria for infrastructure spending, they went ahead with a political decision to treat a healthy environment as valueless anyway. And Ian MacLeod reports on the Harper Cons' political interference to ensure that Canadian art which might not suit the oil sector's agenda didn't get presented around the world.

- Finally, Ralph Surette rightly notes that the Cons are willing - and indeed eager - to tear apart Canada's social fabric in order to cling to power. But I do have to question when this became news.

New column day

Here, on how the Cons' abuse of supporters' donations can only stoke cynicism about the value of participating in politics - but how the limited number of people currently involved in politics creates a huge opportunity to change the system.

For further reading...
- Samara's poll and analysis on public participation can be found here (PDF). 
- The finding that the Conservatives' voter database was used to commit election fraud was of course made by Judge Mosley as discussed here. And CBC's reporting on Greg Horton's affidavit mentions the Conservatives' willingness to lavish $32,000 in donations on Mike Duffy, while Alison documents where Clusterduff stands now.
- Finally, Chris Selley comments on his sympathy for non-participants in light of their current choices - though again, I do think the most important step is for those less involved to take a greater role in shaping who's on the ballot. And Suzanne Moore discusses similar public apathy in the UK.

The unengaged majority

Samara has released a study on the sadly limited level of public participation in Canadian politics and community activities. And Susan Delacourt and Misty Harris both follow up - with Harris catching what looks to me like the most important point:

Sixty per cent of Canadians say they haven’t discussed a political or societal issue face-to-face or over the phone even once in the past 12 months, according to a striking new study by Samara. And it’s not that those conversations have simply moved online, either.

Just 17 per cent of Canadians say they have shared political content via social media in the last year; 15 per cent blogged about a political issue; 30 per cent used email or instant messaging to talk politics; and 25 per cent participated in an online discussion group for such purposes.

“Politics is viewed as a dirty word – something that isn’t appropriate or that should be celebrated,” said Alison Loat, Samara’s executive director. “But it’s through politics that we decide how we’re going to live together, how we shape laws, how we allocate billions of dollars of tax money. . . . It’s the process by which we build our country every day.”

Now, it's particularly striking that the poll question about political or societal issues wasn't limited to the partisan politics which are so often seen as the problem. Instead, the problem extends to a lack of discussion of any issues at all - whether or not they reflect the priorities of political parties.

And I'd think that finding leads to an obvious need for change: to the extent there is a taboo against talking about political issues in a wide variety of settings, that restriction on the scope of expected discussion has gone too far.

Samara's poll actually found more people actually involved in participating within civil society groups, signing petitions or boycotting products than talking about issues. Which means that a substantial number of respondents with enough interest to act on political issues couldn't think of a single time when those same issues were discussed.

That set of respondents raises one challenge: a political culture which to a great extent treats the majority of citizens as passive rather than active participants seems to be reflected in their actions. But it's hard to believe that people signing petitions or engaging in boycotts don't have at least some interest in talking about why they engage in those actions. Which means that the main issue may be a lack of opportunity to get involved - a problem which any political party or activist group should be eager to remedy.

Meanwhile, the survey also includes a substantial number of respondents who aren't involved in any way. But there too, some public affirmation that there's value in discussing political and social issues (along with a greater number of opportunities to participate) would have the potential to make a significant difference - and hopefully create an expectation that everybody will at least think and talk about the issues that affect their lives.

Tuesday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your afternoon reading.

- Alison Loat offers some suggestions to make political parties more responsive to Canadian voters:

(H)ow can parties reorient spending to encourage a more balanced focus across their responsibilities? Political parties serve at least four critical functions: engaging citizens in politics, selecting candidates for office, aggregating policy perspectives and contesting elections.

Today, most funds are directed toward elections at the expense of engaging citizens or developing policy ideas. Party financing should be structured to encourage volunteers and facilitate ways for the voices of these volunteers to be heard.
...
(H)ow do political parties encourage more citizen engagement between elections, particularly in policy development? The Study of Canadian Political Party Members revealed that fewer than half of party members engage in ongoing party activity. Six in 10 respondents said they spent less than one hour on party activity per month.

One way to address this is to establish political party policy foundations. These organizations, common in Europe, provide mechanisms for party supporters and experts to participate in developing policies that address a country’s longer-term challenges.
Political parties have the potential to touch Canadians in most communities across the country. More should be done to ensure they play a part in reinvigorating the connection between citizens and government.

- Of course, it doesn't help that the Harper Cons are indeed forging ahead with their efforts to render government as useless as possible. And if anything, Stephen Gordon is too generous in describing their impact, as they've done plenty to make sure that revenues don't rise to the level of current expenses.

- And Peter Van Loan makes it abundantly clear that listening to anybody else isn't going to be on the agenda as long as his party is in power:

Opposition parties have also complained the Tories are mechanically voting down every one of their amendments without paying attention to the substance.

In a much discussed incident this fall, the Tories refused to accept amendments to their crime bill from Liberal MP and legal scholar Irwin Cotler, only to later try — unsuccessfully — to re-introduce nearly identical amendments themselves. Cotler had sought to make it easier for victims of terrorism and their families to successfully sue the perpetrators.

Van Loan refused to say during the interview whether he thinks it is possible for an opposition party to have a good idea. He acknowledged, however, that the government had not accepted one amendment from the opposition.

- But there's some reason for hope in the latest on the NDP's leadership candidates, including Tobi Cohen's profiles of Nathan Cullen and Romeo Saganash along with Charlie Smith's feature on Peggy Nash.

On common concerns

Most of the discussion of Samara's report on political disengagement has focused on the responses of non-voters. But perhaps more interesting is the fact that the disengaged and the currently-engaged seem to have virtually identical critiques of how our political system fails to function:

"Almost without fail, the disengaged we spoke to described themselves as political outsiders," the study says. "On the basis of their experiences, they described government, bureaucrats, politicians and the media as working for someone else and, therefore, irrelevant to their needs."

Many of the disengaged didn't always feel powerless, the study says. But if they had a concern that needed to be resolved - everything from a speed bump on their street to day care for their children - "they found that no one was responsive."
...
Like non-voters, engaged citizens had little positive to say about politics. "Like the disengaged, they used words such as 'untrustworthy,' 'corruption,' and 'mismanagement' to characterize the political system," the study says. "But the engaged groups seemed to remain hopeful that things could be better."

While frustrated at times by the political system's response, members of the engaged group "kept picking up the phone, knocking on doors and sending emails until they saw results."

Of course, there figures to be far more work done in convincing voters who have decided the political process is futile. But Samara's conversations suggest that there's a massive potential constituency for anybody who can successfully convince doubtful voters that it's possible for politics to result in real positive results for ordinary people (as a matter of substance rather than sloganeering). And that in turn should offer hope for the engaged group that its work can lead to significant results if it helps to make that case.