Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Stephen Hume writes about the importance of tax revenue in building a functional and compassionate Canada:

My taxes provide our mostly peaceful, prosperous and safe society; a health care system that for all its flaws and glitches is pretty darn good compared to the alternatives; a policing and justice system that despite occasional hiccups is fair, merciful and trustworthy; a brave and honourable military.

My taxes provide income support for the unemployed, the indigent, the impaired and the unlucky.

My taxes helped create educational facilities of exceptional quality and performance; public infrastructure that makes doing business in Canada stable, predictable and profitable compared to many other parts of the world.

My taxes keep cities clean and safe and full of life. They provide generally good government by mostly decent, hard-working public servants and politicians.

My taxes helped send Chris Hadfield into space; Carey Price, Hayley Wickenheiser and all our other wonderful athletes to the Olympics. They helped writer Alice Munro and scientist Gerhard Herzberg to win the Nobel Prize. They also paved B.C.’s roads, brought electricity to remote First Nations communities and built bridges across the Fraser River that enable Vancouver’s prosperity.

Canada is far from perfect. Many social injustices remain to address. But life is better than it might be for most of us, even for the aggrieved.

Thank my taxes — and yours — for that.

- Meanwhile, John McDermott offers a worthwhile read on how the UK Cons' attacks on social benefits are making life more difficult for low-income individuals both inside and outside the workforce. And Kathleen Geier highlights how more progressive tax policy could go a long way toward reducing inequality on both local and national levels.

- Huffington Post reports that the Cons' priorities run in exactly the opposite direction - as they continue to encourage the use of temporary foreign workers to suppress wages and channel resource wealth to those who need it least. And CP reports on an internal government study showing that any attempt to sell 20 years of corporatist policies as a benefit to middle-class families is based on myth rather than fact. (Which likely explains why the defenders of the status quo are making up fictitious symbols rather than talking to or about real people.)

- But we're at least seeing much-needed pushback against the Cons' assumption that health, safety and equity all need to be sacrificed on the altar of burning more oil - including from Suncor employee and Unifor member Lori McDaniel, who's earned the NDP's nomination in Fort McMurray-Athabasca.
 
- Finally, Huffington Post also reports on one of the many nasty surprises in Stephen Harper's latest omnibus budget bill, as the Cons are planning to take direct political control over CBC labour relations and personnel decisions.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Lana Payne writes that Canadians care plenty about the well-being of hungry children even if the Cons don't:

After a firestorm of shocked responses from Canadians, Mr. Moore apologized for his “insensitive comment” uttered days before Christmas. What he did not apologize for or reassess was his belief in the kind of fend-for-yourself country his remarks support.

The apology came likely because this is the season of goodwill and it is no time to remind Canadians what drives the current federal government, begging the question of why it is tolerated any time of the year.

Yet despite the outrage, despite their unending troubles, this government marches on towards its goal of building a country where we no longer truly care about the plight of our neighbours.

- PressProgress highlights the unregulated growth of the tar sands and other closely-related industries - including a massive increase in private air traffic. Terry Glavin suggests that there's only one right answer for the Harper Cons in making the final call on the Norther Gateway pipeline. And Stephen Hume isn't buying the Cons' attempts to demonize all opposition to it:

[The Conservatives are making] an argument that non-governmental organizations vowing to stop the proposed project following its approval by the National Energy Board — subject to more than 200 conditions — are somehow undermining the democratic process through intimidation, threats of violent protest, political sabotage, slander and disinformation.

This is all code. It is intended to define a category to which those who think the pipeline is a bad idea can be routinely consigned. Thus, opposition may be dismissed without assessing the merits of the objections — simply opposing the pipeline invites automatic framing of that protest as the work of enemies of the Canadian way of life.

British Columbians have heard all this rhetoric before. It is a propaganda strategy devised by giant public relations firms. It was first deployed here more than 20 years ago by the forest industry in response to protest and civil disobedience aimed at preventing the denuding of great swaths of the province with vast industrial clearcuts.
...
A word to the enthusiasts for this approach: It didn’t work in the early 1990s; it won’t work now.

- Meanwhile, Mike de Souza reports that having eliminated any environmental protection for nearly all of Canada's fisheries and waterways, the Cons are now slashing funding for what few water protection programs were left - even though the department itself has made clear that it needs more resources rather than less.

- Finally, Robin Sears comments on how a scandal-filled year in politics may serve to undermine trust in our political institutions. (Though the sad reality is that the politicians most responsible for that loss of trust are exactly the ones whose ideology might benefit from public antipathy toward politics.)

[Edit: added link.]

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Don Lenihan is the latest to highlight the difference between citizens and consumers - as well as why we should want to act as the former:

In the old view, public debate is all about defining the public interest by establishing collective needs. This requires a very different view of public debate. Rather than seeing it as a chance to advance my wants, it asks me, as a citizen, to consider the needs of the community. This means I must listen to others, weigh their claims, examine the evidence, and make trade-offs and compromises.

When Delacourt talks about citizens having once had a sense of the common good or being willing to make sacrifices for it, we don’t need to believe there was once a golden age of civic participation to agree with her.

The real point is that, not so long ago, citizens had a much clearer sense of their responsibility—as citizens—to balance their personal wants against the public good. Rob Ford’s proclivity to treat citizens first and foremost as taxpayers—and Ford Nation’s inclination to respond—shows just how far we have strayed from this vision.

- Andrew Leach offers his take on what the National Energy Board's rubber-stamping of Northern Gateway means. And Stephen Hume points out the absurdity of the Cons' carefully-scripted process.

- Meanwhile, having managed to eliminate environmental considerations from the Gateway's environmental review process, Stephen Harper has once again kicked any possible greenhouse gas emission regulations past the next federal election. That may break the streak of consecutive "next year!" promises before it reaches an even ten - but it also seems to leave no room for any pretense that a Con government will ever regulate the oil sector.

- Andrew Jackson calls out the Cons' doublespeak on the affordability of a secure pension system. And John Geddes identifies Stephen Harper's pension rhetoric as yet another example of the Cons' beggar-thy-neighbour, every-man-for-himself philosophy.

- Finally, CAUT finds that a strong majority of Canadians both support and recognize the need for unions - while only the predictable 28% would rather see unions and workers silenced.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Mia Rabson comments on the dangers of eliminating any public debate over Canada's future direction - as the Cons are trying to do:

This is one of the most important committees in Parliament. It looks at all government operations and examines spending estimates reports in detail.

To push all the discussions except witness testimony out of the public eye is to allow MPs a free ride and reduce the kind of scrutiny good government requires.

Wallace's motion was postponed on a technicality but it will resurface.

And it's not the only one of its kind.

Also on Tuesday, Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett wanted a debate on her motion before the aboriginal affairs committee to hold two emergency meetings to discuss the housing crisis on reserves. The Conservatives on the committee forced the debate on the motion behind closed doors.

That same day, a motion to go in camera was also introduced at the official languages committee.

Apparently, open and accountable government means Canadians don't get to see or hear what their elected officials think about whether it is worthwhile to debate the housing crisis on reserves. There likely are legitimate arguments on both sides of the debate. We wouldn't know because the debate took place in camera.

The trend to have more and more committee business conducted out of earshot of anyone but members of the committee is something that should concern all Canadians.

When government doesn't operate out in the open, there is no accountability.

When there is no accountability, democracy is harder to achieve.

- Meanwhile, Chantal Hebert is more concerned that the media didn't pry more into Jack Layton's health during this spring's election campaign. But it's at least worth noting in hindsight that the media was indeed far too slow to give the NDP coverage as anything more than a curiosity.

- Meanwhile, Bruce Anderson is horrified to discover that the NDP's leadership candidates are actually running to lead the NDP rather than the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation.

- Finally, Stephen Hume pinpoints the source of the state of deprivation facing Attawapiskat and other remote First Nations:

Let's be clear about what reserves are. They are a government invention. Reserves were created by government to concentrate, for administrative purposes, peoples who roamed those landscapes and exploited their resources.

So perhaps the reasonable question is: Why is Attawapiskat not viable?

It's not viable because the community was separated from the economic resource base that would otherwise sustain it.

Could Prince George be viable if it were denied the vast forest hinterland that sustains it? Arguing that Prince George is viable because its economy is sustained by forest resources appropriated from around Fort Ware, while Fort Ware is by some magical thinking then declared economically unviable, begs some re-thinking.

The forest, mineral and energy resource base surrounding Attawapiskat was appropriated by the Crown, which receives the rents from its exploitation by corporations. A minuscule proportion of those rents is returned to the original occupants.
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Perhaps the question that Canadians should be asking of their federal government is why, after a century of responsibility for aboriginal communities that are entirely creatures of Ottawa, is the system such a disgraceful, chaotic, festering mess of bungling, red tape, bureaucratic incompetence and political prevarication? Why are we still blaming the victims of our policies?