Friday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Friday reading.

- Susan Riley points out that nothing positive figures to come from the Cons' plans to slash Canada's public service:

No good will come of proposed public service cuts, if experience is any guide. Not a leaner, more nimble public service, certainly, and not a more affordable one. Any savings, history suggests, will be illusory, counter-productive or transient.
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It is "theoretically possible" to redesign a bureaucracy to reward enterprise, improve efficiency and prune outdated programs and unproductive individuals, says Carleton University business professor Linda Duxbury. And she believes the federal shop, which has grown relentlessly in the Harper years, is due for a downsizing.

"But the practical reality is that it rarely happens," she says. That's because politicians don't start by asking what they want the public service to do - and what skills will be needed - but focus obsessively on saving money.

And the easiest way to save money is to reduce staffing. Whenever the economy falters, politicians resort to easy caricature - the public servant as indulged, pencil-pushing slacker - and out come the pink slips and running shoes.
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Next week, Clement, nine other ministers and senior mandarins - along with a private consultant making $90,000 a day - will receive plans from 70 departments and agencies outlining potential five-per-cent cuts, and 10-per-cent cuts, in ongoing spending. And, while Treasury Board isn't promising retirement, or buyout, incentives to workers, apparently senior executives will get bonuses (bounty is such an ugly word) based on the savings they find.

It adds up to a disaster-in-themaking: impulsive cuts motivated by optics and ideology, with notional savings devoured by new priorities - more prisons, more foreign military interventions and those expensive fighter jets.

- But then, Dan Gardner once again notes that evidence of any expected positive outcome has been deemed utterly unnecessary as the Cons continue to push their dumb-on-crime agenda:

The Conservatives had long claimed that mandatory minimums worked. They campaigned on it. But they didn't actually have any evidence that this was true, so when I called the minister's office, the minister's office demanded the civil service whip up some evidence. Pronto.

What the civil service came up with was the best case they could make for the minister's claim. Lipstick on a pig, in other words.

Now, one might think the minister and his staff would have been taken aback by this experience. This was a key claim about a critical issue. And they had been forced to confront the fact that they had no evidence. Maybe that would make them worry a little. Experience some doubt. Even - let us speak in whispers - reconsider.

I don't know if they worried or doubted. But they did reconsider: From then on, the Conservatives stopped even pretending to have evidence to support their claims.
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Research is a drag. Assessing evidence is boring. Marshalling arguments takes work. And the Conservatives have made it absolutely clear that they have no intention of engaging in a meaningful, evidence-based discussion about crime policy.

Maybe that will change some day. I hope so. This is important stuff. I'd love to have the sort of substantive, back-and-forth debate that helps the public decide what is and isn't true.

But until then, I'll simply make an assertion - this government is cynical, contemptuous, and intellectually bankrupt - and leave it that.

- Apparently the NDP is doing more than just calling out Sebastien Togneri for trying to stifle criticism: it's also introducing terminology unfamiliar to Canada's media as to how parties try to shut down public discussion. So for the benefit of Jennifer Ditchburn and others who may be going off of audio rather than written references: the term is SLAPP.

- Finally, there seems to be an entertaining finger-pointing war going on between the Cons and the defence department over - with lower-level officials joining Walt Natynczyk in getting called out for overuse of publicly-owned jets, while Peter MacKay tries to answer for using a search and rescue helicopter to get back from vacation and a Challenger jet to get to a lobster festival. But let's note that there seems to be a common theme of expensive government transportation being used on both sides of the institutional divide between the Cons and the department - which may call into question whether there's a genuine need for planes which apparently weren't being used otherwise.

On clean campaigns

Sure, the NDP's opponents are salivating over what isn't yet known about the party's candidates and potential MPs in Quebec. But let's put that argument based on a lack of evidence into perspective.

After all, we're currently stuck with a micro-managing Prime Minister whose level of control putatively extends as far as running background checks on individuals entering his party's rallies. Yet his party's campaign has been derailed in just the last couple of days by revelations that they've appointed a fanatic who rants about "black shirts" and the "SS" to a gun advisory committee, their happy acceptance of campaign support from a dangerous offender and Paul Bernardo admirer, and the knowledge that a star candidate has been repudiated by her own family while gladly accepting an endorsement from one of the country's most notorious terrorist financiers. And that's to say nothing of the scandal-ridden staffers who have made regular appearances on the campaign trail.

Meanwhile, from the party which is expected to crumble under scrutiny, the closest there is to that type of story is...idle speculation from other parties' spinmeisters.

Lest there be any doubt, I'm not a huge fan of gotcha politics in any event. But for anybody making a remotely rational comparison between the NDP and its rivals in this campaign, it's Jack Layton and company who have done the best job of avoiding any impropriety or perception thereof.

Tuesday Morning Riding Links

With #elxn41 in full swing, let's take a quick look at a few noteworthy developments at the riding level.

- First, the sudden retirement of Lib MP Raymonde Folco may result in a fascinating riding battle in Laval-Les Îles - a seat which was nearly won by the Bloc in 2006, and saw substantial improvements for the NDP and Cons in 2008. With the Libs starting from scratch in the middle of a campaign (and the Cons also apparently without a listed candidate), the Bloc might be a slight favourite to start - but it's not hard to envision a true four-way race which leaves all parties guessing until election day.

- There's much less doubt who's in contention in Palliser. And it's worth noting that Jack Layton's Regina and Moose Jaw stops yesterday were both in the riding - signalling that it's rightly at the top of the NDP's list of Con seats which can be won with a strong local effort.

- Meanwhile, the Cons' attempt to target Linda Duncan in Edmonton Strathcona has taken a turn for the embarrassing, as disgraced former staffer Sebastien Togneri is taking a break from being the subject of an RCMP investigation to lend his services to Ryan Hastman's campaign. I only hope we'll also get to see Hastman live-tweet about door-knocking with Bruce Carson.

- Finally, just in case we needed a reminder as to whose side the Cons are actually on, it shouldn't pass without comment that the Cons are apparently entirely happy to recruit a military procurement lobbyist to carry their banner against NDP MP Carol Hughes in Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing.

Burning question

How long before the Cons declare that their political control information extends no further extends no further than Sebastien Togneri and two of his co-workers who all mistakenly interfered in various files - and that this time they mean it until somebody proves otherwise?

Saturday Afternoon Links

Some content to help fill your weekend...

- The Chronicle Herald tears into the Cons' continued refusal to listen to reason or anything else when it comes to the long form census:

The government has been advised by its statisticians, by provinces and municipalities and by hundreds of organizations that depend on accurate census data that a voluntary census will not produce reliable, usable results. Former Chief Statistician Munir Sheikh felt it necessary to resign in order to inform us that the government’s plan would degrade the data (and to correct Industry Minister Tony Clement’s misrepresentation that Mr. Sheikh supported the plan).

A government document filed as evidence in a lawsuit that is aimed at stopping the change also acknowledges that switching to a voluntary survey will mean some data "will not be usable for a range of objectives for which the census information would be needed."

To ignore all this and to proceed with killing the detailed census is grossly irresponsible. Real people will suffer when there is poorer information about where services are needed.
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But the government had the same response for this expression of Parliament’s will as it had for science, fact and commonsense. It doesn’t care and it isn’t budging.
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(O)n it goes in a parade of unbelievably silly, trivial and discredited arguments.

The Conservatives are debating and governing with their fingers in their ears. It makes no sense and it’s not a pretty sight.

- Stephen Maher notes that whatever one's view of ministerial responsibility, the reality is that the Cons' culture of information suppression starts at the top. And that may make for the most important rebuttal to any spin as to whether to blame individual ministers or their subordinates: the Cons have a concerted effort to keep facts away from Canadians in every department under their control, and the real problem is Stephen Harper.

- Meanwhile, Kady O'Malley has posted the definitive Sebastien Togneri document dump.

- Dan Gardner writes a scathing indictment of the lack of action to protect sex workers, and notes that if the judiciary has had to step in it's only because Lib and Con governments alike have chosen to do nothing:

Let me repeat: a judge concluded that the law is helping to butcher women. Sure, it’s fun to argue about the role of the judiciary. Important, even. But isn’t the judge’s conclusion about what the law is doing to women just a little more worrying than the possibility that a judge’s interpretation of her role is excessively expansive?

Place the two issues on a scale and weigh them. On one side: an overstepping judge. On the other: thousands of bruised and bleeding women. And several hundred corpses.

Which matters more?

Now, I want to emphasize that reasonable people can look at the evidence and come to a different conclusion that Justice Himel. But what no reasonable person can do is shrug. The mere possibility that the law is contributing to brutality inflicted on vulnerable women is horrifying. A reasonable person who hears this will want to know more. A reasonable person will demand further investigation. A reasonable person will insist on getting to the bottom of this, now.

- Finally, I'll have plenty to say later on. But for commentary on the Cons' decree that anybody having anything to do with a major Canadian Islamic organization is to be shunned, the posts by Dr. Dawg, Balbulican, pogge, Dave, Greg and Cliff are well worth a look.

(Edit: fixed label.)