Friday Evening Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Angella MacEwen discusses how most of what's sold as "free trade" serves mostly to hand power to the corporate sector at the expense of the public. Ashley Csanady and Monika Warzecha point out that the same is true for Ontario's business subsidies and tax credits which are normally advertised as benefiting workers. And Paul Tukker reports on the publicly-funded cost to clean up abandoned mines in the Yukon as yet another example of how we're paying the price for exploitative corporate practices.

- Meanwhile, the Canadian Press contrasts the B.C. NDP's push to take big donors out of politics against Christy Clark's insistence on being able to fund her campaigns with corporate money.

- Coral Davenport discusses new research showing that it's possible to decouple economic development from increasing carbon emissions.

- The Globe and Mail questions the Libs' sudden loss of interest in access to information now that their actions stand to be held to account.

- Finally, Desmond Cole calls out an insidious attempt to label as "violent" peaceful protests and their response to state violence.

Missing perspective

Brian Lilley is proving himself a committed Con soldier both in trying to build outrage over political party funding, and in pointing to the per-vote subsidy as the only part of the scheme that might be changed. But his most obvious source of distortion is this:

Nearly $8 million dollars each year is spent on “research bureaus” to which each party represented in Parliament is entitled. Yet despite their name, people familiar with the operations of these offices admit most of the time, their activities are not the type of research activities Canadians would expect.

“They read through books and speeches on the opposition, pull quotes from newspaper stories, build websites to attack each other and spin the media,” said one source who has worked in one research bureau.

Which raises a couple of obvious questions. First, how much money is spent in PMO and departmental budgets to do exactly the same thing on behalf of the government? And shouldn't that be the area most ripe for cuts based on waste and duplication given that the Cons have their own party resources that they can rely on as well?

On giveaways

Geoff Matthews highlights a CTF report criticizing the amount of money some corporations have raked in through federal government assistance. While it's too simplistic to assume that none of the payments had some good reason behind them, the all-too-rare attention to corporate subsidies should play nicely to the NDP's current effort to put people back at the front of the line over big business interests...that is, as long as it isn't long forgotten by the time Canadians again decide which party should be put in charge of deciding how to handle Canada's public money.