Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Cameron Dearlove laments the fact that Canada is failing to recognize and replicate other countries' successes in using the social determinants of health to shape public policy:

Today we know that social and financial inequities — particularly the experience of poverty — has a greater impact on our health than our healthcare system, genetics, even lifestyle choices. For a society facing spiking healthcare costs, the social determinants of health (things like housing, food security, social inclusion, early childhood development, employment, and working conditions) arguably present the greatest public policy opportunity since the creation of our social safety net, after the Second World War. While Canada is at the forefront of research in the social determinants of health, we are laggards in turning this research into healthy public policy — while Finnish babies benefit from sleeping in their care-filled boxes, Canadian children rest outside the box.

If the social determinants of health hold such promise, what are we doing locally, provincially, and nationally to apply these ideas? How do we rewrite conventional wisdom so that governments, institutions and communities are using the powerful social determinants framework to encourage longer, healthier, happier lives?

- Meanwhile, Donald Hirsch writes about the changing - and sadly spreading - shape of child poverty in the UK. And Barbara Howard offers a moment of perspective on how the disasters which some people can easily brush off cause far more problems for the working poor.

- Paul Krugman notes that the Republicans' tax policy continues to reflect little more than bare class warfare by other names in cutting taxes on the rich while raising them for everybody else.

- Heather Mallick traces the demise of Sun News to its constant bullying, while Christopher Waddell sees it as having been based largely on a failed attempt to game Canada's broadcasting system.

As an aside, others are asking how it is that a network seemingly set up to further the Cons' interests didn't actually get enough preferential treatment to survive despite its lack of merit. But I'll note that the government isn't the only force which could have kept the network afloat - and given the massive amount of money put into corporate communications, it's telling also that Canada's plutocrats didn't have any interest in footing the bill for a media outlet which seemed to fit their political interests.

- Finally, Craig Forcese and Kent Roach offer a detailed look at the contents of the Cons' terror bill. Thomas Walkom - who deserves plenty of blame as the media originator of the theory that no opposition party would oppose C-51 - is finally beginning to recognize that the NDP is in fact standing up for civil rights against the Cons' fearmongering. Stephen Maher talks to a former CSIS officer and finds even more reason for concern with what the Cons are trying to pull. And Don Lenihan writes that he sees the Cons primarily as having made Canadian politics more authoritarian rather than more conservative - though I'm not sure it's an either-or proposition.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Alison highlights the attempts of Sun TV to rally the most extreme reactionary movements in the country behind its bid for mandatory carriage. And the question of whether we want to publicly sanction a network beholden to such interest groups would seem to answer whether the application is justified.

- Paul Krugman comments that the Republicans' attacks on disabled workers are both thoroughly contrary to any sense of fairness, and utterly useless in practice:

(W)hen Reagan ranted about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, he was inventing a fake problem — but his rant resonated with angry white voters, who understood perfectly well who Reagan was targeting. But Americans on disability as moochers? That isn’t, as far as I can tell, an especially nonwhite group — and it’s a group that is surely as likely to elicit sympathy as disdain. There’s just no way it can serve the kind of political purpose the old welfare-kicking rhetoric used to perform.
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The point, I think, is that right-wing intellectuals and politicians live in a bubble in which denunciations of those bums on disability and those greedy children getting free health care are greeted with shouts of approval — but now have to deal with a country where the same remarks come across as greedy and heartless (because they are).

- Justin Ling spins a rollicking yarn about Justin Trudeau's whiplash-inducing reversals on federalism.

- Nick Cohen notes that even the U.K.'s Conservatives are starting to come to terms with the failins of doctrinaire free-market dogma. And Seth Ackerman offers an interesting discussion as to how the benefits of markets can be decoupled from the tendency toward corporatism found in our current version:

What is needed is a structure that allows autonomous firms to produce and trade goods for the market, aiming to generate a surplus of output over input — while keeping those firms public and preventing their surplus from being appropriated by a narrow class of capitalists. Under this type of system, workers can assume any degree of control they like over the management of their firms, and any “profits” can be socialized– that is, they can truly function as a signal, rather than as a motive force. But the precondition of such a system is the socialization of the means of production — structured in a way that preserves the existence of a capital market. How can all this be done?

Start with the basics. Private control over society’s productive infrastructure is ultimately a financial phenomenon. It is by financing the means of production that capitalists exercise control, as a class or as individuals. What’s needed, then, is a socialization of finance  — that is, a system of common, collective financing of the means of production and credit.
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At the end of the process, firms no longer have individual owners who seek to maximize profits. Instead, they are owned by society as a whole, along with any surplus (“profits”) they might generate. Since firms still buy and sell in the market, they can still generate a surplus (or deficit) that can be used to judge their efficacy. But no individual owner actually pockets these surpluses, meaning that no one has any particular interest in perpetuating or exploiting the profit-driven mis-valuation of goods that is endemic under capitalism. The “social democratic solution” that was once a contradiction – selectively frustrating the profit motive to uphold the common good, while systematically relying on it as the engine of the system – can now be reconciled.

To the same end, the accrual of interest to individuals’ bank deposits can be capped at a certain threshold of wealth, and beyond that level it could be limited to simply compensate for inflation. (Or the social surplus could be divided up equally among everyone and just paid out as a social dividend.) This would yield not exactly the euthanasia of the rentier, but of the rentier “interest” in society. And while individuals could still be free to start businesses, once their firms reached a certain size, age and importance, they would have to “go public”: to be sold by their owners into the socialized capital market.
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But the basic point is clear enough: since these firms buy and sell in the market, their performance can be rationally judged. A firm could be controlled entirely by its workers, in which case they could simply collect its entire net income, after paying for the use of the capital. Or it could be “owned” by an entity in the socialized capital market, with a management selected by that entity and a strong system of worker co-determination to counterbalance it within the firm. Those managers and “owners” could be evaluated on the relative returns the firm generates, but they would have no private property rights over the absolute mass of profits. If expectations of future performance needed to be “objectively” judged in some way, that is something the socialized capital markets could do.

Such a program does not amount a utopia; it does not proclaim Year Zero or treat society as a blank slate. What it tries to do is sketch a rational economic mechanism that denies the pursuit of profit priority over the fulfillment of human needs.

- Which leads nicely to Simon Enoch's analysis as to how the Sask Party is following a traditional right-wing model in trying to undermine the successful publicly-owned institutions we already enjoy in Saskatchewan.

- Finally, Josh Eidelson discusses the "alt-labor" movement seeking to improve the lot of workers through means other than traditional certification.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Trish Hennessy assembles a handy set of ideas to deal with income inequality.

- No, there isn't much new in the Cons' familiar pattern of deceiving the public, covering it up, then lying by about the cover-up by blaming civil servants who can't publicly defend themselves. But it is a noteworthy development that Sun TV has apparently joined Stephen Harper among the upper ranks of Con symbols whose reputations are to be preserved at all costs.

- Meanwhile, Cons' latest frivolous use of public money - tens of thousands of dollars in car rental expenses in a walkable village - looks significant largely in the Cons' total lack of shame or self-awareness.

- But have no fear: if the Cons have their way when it comes to pulling away from the international scene, the rest of the world won't have any interest in noticing they're running a banana republic. 

- Finally, Tim Harper wonders whether issue-based cooperation across party lines in Simcoe North might lay the groundwork for electoral non-competition - though if anything it seems to signal more that there's value in working through non-party structures, rather than obsessing over how to force a formal agreement among competing parties.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Yes, the fraudulent collaboration between the Harper Cons and Sun TV should offer nothing but reason for suspicion about both portions of the right-wing noise machine - and Dr. Dawg, Heather Mallick, Simon Houpt and the Star have all had plenty to say. But let's add a third major problem to the dishonesty on both sides: shouldn't a government supposedly committed to efficiency (and preparing to take an axe to numerous departments as a result) expect its civil servants to have something better to do than to act as props for a photo op?

- I'll have to take issue with Dan Gardner's column on OAS by offering a reminder that the "but retirements are getting longer!" doesn't exactly apply across the board:

(T)hose working but in low income will lose a hefty portion of the OAS/GIS benefits that would otherwise have been paid to them.

It is all too often forgotten that, notwithstanding rising longevity, many of those in lower income groups still die relatively young.

...(T)here is a big difference of probability of survival to age 75 by income group, and also by aboriginal status.

So for Gardner or anybody else who's actually concerned about ensuring parity in retirement time, the answer is to make sure that OAS and other benefits are available to lower-income seniors at a low enough age to allow for a reasonably comparable period of retirement - while withdrawing the Cons' handouts to the wealthy from people who don't need them.

- Meanwhile, David Climenhaga notes that the Cons' attacks on pensions shouldn't come as any surprise. And Stephen Maher comments on the Cons' starve-the-public strategy:

Reagan put it this way in 1982: "There were always those who told us that taxes couldn't be cut until spending was reduced. Well, you know, we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath. Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance."

It's known as "starving the beast." Rather than doing the politically painful work of cutting spending, you cut taxes and increase public debt to the point where it is necessary to cut spending to keep the repo men at bay.

Unlike Reagan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has never publicly discussed his "starve the beast" plan, but it's pretty clear that that's what he's doing.
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Last month, (Harper) told Calgary radio host Dave Rutherford to expect "fairly aggressive action" to "position this country for growth over the next generation."

That sounds like more radical surgery than the inefficiencies he blandly discussed during the campaign.

It may mean cuts to Employment Insurance and equalization.

Having starved the beast, Harper may now be ready to climb into the cage and take on the weakened creature more forcefully.

- Finally, Carol Goar theorizes that the Cons should work with the public on contentious issues rather than ramming through zero-consultation bills without debate.

And I'd agree entirely from the perspective of providing remotely responsive and competent government. But I suspect the fact that the Cons have so resolutely refused to allow any meaningful discussion speaks volumes about the outcome they'd expect if they had to defend their ideological positions by doing anything more than repeating talking points - making a concerted effort to shut out the public an inevitable part of their plans to trash Canada beyond recognition.

Leadership 2012 Roundup

No, I won't claim to have entirely comprehensive coverage of the NDP's leadership race. But I do try to catch the developments that strike me as significant for each candidate and the race as a whole...so let's take a look at what's new over the past few days.

To start off with, the Laurier–Sainte-Marie debate on Sunday received one major media story as well as being live-tweeted by Alice and Justin among others. The main storylines look to have been another strong performance by Nathan Cullen and a call by Thomas Mulcair to emphasize asymmetric federalism - but I'll reserve judgment until I have a chance to watch the debate for myself, particularly since the in-debate commentary included conflicting takes on a couple of key points.

Meanwhile...

- Niki Ashton made a push for peace, highlighting the Harper Cons' attacks on Islam in particular being ill-advised. But more broadly, the use of military force may actually make for an issue to watch if the leadership contenders are pressed as to when they'd see fit to use Canada's armed forces to meet foreign policy goals.

- Paul Dewar expanded on the "Next 70" theme introduced last week while earning a supportive column from Peter Thurley.

- Mulcair became the first candidate to receive the full-on Sun Media treatment - though we can expect that there's plenty more where that came from. (And for the record, here's my take from last time the citizenship question came up.)

- Peggy Nash answered questions from CBC viewers, including one on what the NDP can do for western Canada.

- And finally, Romeo Saganash's Ontario tour featured both a new blog post on how the Cons value corporate profits over taking care of people, and some positive press from the Star.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Aaron Wherry profiles how some of the NDP's youngest MPs won a place in office, and the work they're doing now that they hold the role.

- It isn't the kind of endorsement against type that would have the largest possible effect on the leadership race. But Alexa McDonough's support for Peggy Nash nonetheless figures to solidify Nash's place in the top tier of leadership contenders.

- Yes, Sun Media's report about the Libs' campaign spending looks more like an effort to breathe life into an end-of-campaign non-story than anything of substance. But it's particularly worth noting that if there was a $1 million gap between the Libs' campaign limit and their actual spending, that's $4.5 million less than the comparable gap in 2008 - meaning that the Libs pulled out more of the stops in their 2011 fall to third place than in the previous election where they conspicuously held back.

- Meanwhile, Bob Hepburn points out that the Libs' attempt to earn attention in the midst of the NDP's leadership race really reflects nothing more than a road map to nowhere. And it's particularly worth questioning which of the policy priorities cited by Bob Rae as forming the basis of his party's existence hasn't been better dealt with by the NDP for years.

- Finally, it's great to see Occupy Regina standing firm in the face of the City's efforts to shut it down.

Fighting back

It's probably been nothing more than a matter of time before a few more of the institutions in crosshairs of the Cons and their allies started fighting back rather than hoping to lay low for four years. And the CBC's brilliant takedown of Quebecor - just as the Cons aim to turn committee hearings into a show trial against our public broadcaster - looks to provide a template for many more to follow.

Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Simon Enoch rightly criticizes the Cons' fair-weather commitment to democracy in the wake of a fairly resounding vote on the part of Canadian Wheat Board members to preserve the institution and its single-desk status against the Cons' attacks. But let's note another ridiculous side to the Cons' position: they're now rejecting the results of a vote which actually offered a clear and direct choice, after choosing to trumpet the manipulated results of a far more questionable voting process as justifying their determination to destroy the CWB.

- Kai Nagata joins up with the Tyee, and makes a splash with his first warning about Quebecor's dominance of Quebec's media scene.

- Chantal Hebert points out how the Libs' willingness to play along with security-state rhetoric in their later years in government helped to lead to their subsequent electoral downfall:

The see-no-evil/hear-no-evil rules on detainee transfers from the Canadian Forces to the Afghan authorities that opened the door to abuse at the hands of local jailers were ratified by a Liberal government.

The decision to support the jailing of 15-year-old Omar Khadr in Guantanamo and the illegal CSIS interrogations that followed took place on the Liberal watch.

Chrétien was in power when Canadian engineer Maher Arar was taken off a plane in the United States and subsequently deported to torture chambers in Syria.

It was successive Liberal governments that initially refused to allow Abousfian Abdelrazik to return home from Sudan in 2003 — an exile forced on a Canadian citizen that was to last six years.

The Liberals were in power only for the first half of the past decade but they very much shaped post 9/11 Canada as we now know it.

In so doing they also (accidentally) set in motion a major realignment of the federal landscape,

The change in the channels triggered by the events of 9/11 provided conservatives of all partisan stripes with fresh common ground — distanced from the disputed terrain of the recent past — on which to focus.

It also brought a harder-edged Conservative leadership within the redefined mainstream of Canadian politics.

More importantly, the post 9/11 symbiosis between the Liberals and the Conservatives allowed the NDP and its contrary voice to become relevant again.
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Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the events of 9/11 did not so much pave the way to a more conservative Canada as open the door to a more polarized and less Liberal country.

- Finally, Paul Wells discusses how the Cons' current decision-making core reflects the diversity that is Canada's pool of single white males.

Sunday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your long weekend.

- I'll agree with pogge that Tabatha Southey's latest is well worth a read. But while it's worth recognizing the differences between the respective priorities involved in managing a country as opposed to a family, there's one point hinted at by Southey which should be seen more as a similarity than it actually is:

(W)hile living within one's means is a noble goal, few people, and very few businesses, balance their budgets on a year-to-year basis. They have mortgages, for example, or loans taken out to expand investment, or because of unforeseen strife.

But then they also have assets. So debt is also investment.

It's easy to alarm people over a deficit. It's a high number and people are forever being told that it's theirs and their children's debt and specifically how much of it is theirs, per capita.

But no one ever tells them how much highway they own, per capita, or what section of the Grand Canyon is theirs. It's a very one-sided, frequently opportunistic way of expressing the situation.

Of course, part of the problem is that parties on the right tend to be averse to public ownership in the first place. But for the rest of us, it's well worth keeping in mind the value of owning assets publicly - and ensuring that value isn't lost to corporate-focused P3 or privatization schemes in deciding what to do with public resources.

- Antonia Zerbisias points out that we can't take a safesupply of water for granted. Sadly, Regina offers a case in point.

- The Cons make up poor excuses for their decision to prevent NDP MP Ryan Cleary from visiting the 9 Wing Gander air base. CC calls BS.

- Finally, Origins of Politics points out how Sun Media is giving far more reach and exposure to bigotry on the Canadian political scene.

Layton Announcement Roundup

Not much to add on this end to the news that Jack Layton is taking a temporary leave of absence to deal with a new form of cancer. But let's note a few of the pieces which stand out in the day's coverage.

- The CP reviewed the outpouring of best wishes from across the political spectrum.
- Conversely, Buckdog chronicled of some of the more appalling Sun comments.
- Tim Harper described the fight of Layton's life.
- Chris Selley emphasized Layton's bravery and optimism even at the toughest of times.
- The Globe and Mail noted Layton's true home in politics.
- And finally, for those who haven't seen it yet, here's Layton's own statement.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted material for your weekend reading.

- Paul Wells puts his observations about Stephen Harper's inexplicable warnings about Canada's eventual disappearance into column form. But I have to wonder whether Harper is really just taking the logical next step in non-specific right-wing messaging: rather than limiting his scope to a war on, say, "terror" to justify a perpetual focus on the security state rather than social priorities, doesn't it make some sense to simply declare pre-emptive and permanent war on that which we might someday see fit (or be convinced) to fear?

- Chris Selley dares Sun Media to be honest about following a gutter press model:

I’d vastly prefer if the irrepressibly malevolent energy behind this style of journalism was directed at unearthing scandals that matter, instead of which bottle-fed twit on the England starting 11 cheated with another one’s wife. But at least it has the courage of its lack of convictions. There was something very out of character about the Sun printing the Duchess’s behind -and the accompanying article and explanations (“bathing suits show off more”) suggest it knows it.

Running a tabloid is an inherently contradictory exercise. You have to sell prurience and abhor it at the same time. And the Canadian Sun papers abhor it too much, I think, to peddle it convincingly. The Sun used to have a page-three girl in a bathing suit. Now she’s way back behind the sports section. The Daily Star’s page-three girl is still on page three, and she usually topless -and even the Daily Star didn’t use as revealing a shot of the Duchess as the Sun did.

Embrace the trash or don’t, I say. If you want to win like Rupert Murdoch, turn off the brain, aim for the gutter and put the pedal down.

- But then, Rick Salutin points out that Canada already doesn't have much to crow about from a media perspective:

Can we declare a moratorium on Canadian Schadenfreude over Rupert Murdoch and his British tabs? They deserve what they're getting and more. But it tends to conceal the mote in our own eye.

What mote is that? Jonathan Schell in the The Nation (and reprinted in the Star) says the Murdoch papers "replaced" the noble aims of journalism with "titillation and gossip." Try not to think of Canadian coverage of the royal tour last week when you read that, I dare you. It was all T&G all the time. The CBC was the worst and it lacks even the excuse of needing to maximize profits for shareholders. Now, with the royals departed, it's still hard to find much on CBC news.

What about the Murdochian impulse to control politics along a right-wing axis? Well, the National Post was clearly created in 1998 to push Canadian journalism rightward and has had smashing success. In last May's election, every daily in Canada, except the Star and the smallish Le Devoir, endorsed Stephen Harper. Even in the last U.K. election you didn't get such uniformity.

I repeat: In a pissing contest, the Murdoch tabs win. They piss farthest and foulest. But we're only talking quantity at that point.

- Finally, the widespread exposure of the American Legislative Exchange Council is well worth watching in tracing the spread of regressive legislation throughout the U.S. But the example of corporate-written bills being delivered to legislators for immediate passage also looks to be one to keep in mind in assessing the actions of right-wing governments in Canada.

On surprising standards

I'm sure Terence Corcoran thinks he's making a brilliant sarcastic point of some sort. But ideology aside, is there actually any reason to disagree in the slightest with his portrayal of the Guardian's take on the NotW scandal?

And we have The Guardian, revered organ of the British left, leading the charge against News of the World, reviled organ of the Murdochian right, for breach of journalistic ethics — the same Guardian that became the British home of WikiLeaks’ illegal dump of U.S. diplomatic communications. Clearly a large double-standard reigns at The Guardian. It is good and just for the media to engage in illegal activity to wage ideological war on causes and political powers those same media have determined in their wisdom to be wrong or immoral, but it is reprehensible and immoral to engage in illegal activity to probe the private affairs of celebrities, royalty or common people.

Or put in simpler terms: is Corcoran honestly arguing that the media should be just as vigilant and ready to toss aside the formalities of the law in "(probing) the private affairs...of common people" as it is in holding policymakers (who may themselves have ordered information suppressed on questionable grounds) to account for their decisions?

Because if so, I can't believe he hasn't yet found his way to Sun Media.

Wednesday Evening Links

Assorted content to end your day.

- Charlie Angus is leading the charge against the Cons' plan to ram through lawful access legislation, labeling it as warrantless snooping and spying on Canadians. We'll have to see how far Angus can get in swaying public opinion, but a concerted effort over the summer could go a long way to at least make this part of the dumb-on-crime strategy into a political loser for the Cons.

- Sun Media isn't prepared to meet basic media standards for accuracy and fairness. On a newsworthiness scale, this ranks somewhere below "dog bites man" - is "dog wants food" common enough to fit the bill?

- Meanwhile, the Conference Board of Canada not only recognizing a growing level of inequality but also hinting that it's a problem actually does qualify as a remarkable turn of events.

The 33-year trend which has accelerated since 1993, raises questions about the country’s economic well-being, including whether Canada is using all the skills and talents of its citizens and whether social cohesion and fairness are being undermined, says How Canada Performs: Is Canada becoming more unequal?

Social policy experts who have been raising the alarm over Canada’s growing income gap since 2006, say the Conference Board report represents a watershed.

“The significance of this report is that it is now firmly on the radar of the business establishment,” said economist Armine Yalnizyan who has written several reports on the issue for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives that are referenced by the Conference Board.

“The jury is no longer out. This is a pressing issue of our era,” Yalnizyan said in an interview.

- Finally, the Cons have officially completed the Harper Shuffle on their earlier suppression of a report on the Champlain Bridge, having completely reversed their position without either admitting they were wrong or even acknowledging that they've changed course.

Death to diplomacy!

I'll give Sun Media this much: they're being slightly less partisan than I'd have expected in their bombast, following up their demand to fire a diplomat for the crime of following the alphabet with Brian Lilley's equally vituperative screed against an acknowledgment of historical fact by the president of the Conservative Party.

But I'm rather curious how a media service expects to survive trying to fabricate a scandal out of every instance of civil behaviour toward somebody who's seen as unpopular. And indeed, I have to wonder whether anybody trying to meet that remarkable standard would want to steer clear of Sun itself.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Yes, plenty of attention is being paid to Canada's weak ranking when it comes to innovation. But it's well worth noting that the failure isn't for lack of billions of dollars being tossed down a sinkhole due to the Cons' distaste for active and effective government:

Other countries prefer to just give tax money to companies that perform a lot of research. We’re allergic to that kind of thinking in Canada, so the chart for direct national-government spending on private-sector research looks like this:

But since the point of supporting private-sector research is to produce more private-sector research, and not just to show up in a flattering place on a chart, it’s pretty clear that Canada’s preference for tax incentives over direct subsidy doesn’t work.

- Meanwhile, there may be room to quibble with a few of Serge Coulombe's points. But this much looks dead on in describing what we should be doing with our resource revenues (which in turn need to be high enough to support the cause):

Newfoundland and Labrador saw the largest improvement in production per worker because the province moved away from a low-productivity natural resource business, fishing, to a higher-productivity natural resource activity, oil extraction, and it recorded the largest improvement in education.

This boom in production per worker growth on the back of higher resource prices is inherently temporary. When Newfoundland and Labrador’s oil runs low, just as the fish stocks did, or resource prices falter, the province will need to rely on savings stuffed away now to invest in better education, infrastructure and technology.

Alberta has had among the lowest growth rates of educational achievement and production per worker, partly reflecting young workers not investing in higher education because of the easy money in the oil sands.

For provinces booming now because of high resource prices, saving non-renewable resource revenues in rainy-day funds is crucial to keeping the good times rolling.

- Marc Lee expands on the CCPA's finding that B.C.'s tax system is now outright regressive by tracing what's happened under the province's Lib government over the past decade:

Unsurprisingly, total BC taxes as a share of income declined for every income group. This has undermined funding for public services, but has also led to a shift in who pays how much. The average tax cut was 2.3% of income, though there were larger gains as income increased. Tax reductions were only worth about 1% of income for the lower-middle deciles, increase to 1.8% of income for the upper-middle, then rise to 3.6% for the top 10%. However, the top 1% got tax cuts worth 5.1% of their income. In dollar terms, that is a gain of $41,000 for the top 1%, while those in the bottom deciles average a tax cut of a couple hundred bucks.

By contrast, in 2000 BC had a relatively flat tax system, with a modest bump in tax rate for the top 1%. By 2010, the tax system as a whole had shifted to become regressive. Income tax cuts, unsurprisingly, were the principal driver of lower taxes. The value of income tax cuts averaged about 0.2% of income for the bottom decile, rising to 5.2% for the top 1%. The provincial income tax system continues to be progressive, but has flattened out over the course of the decade.

Gains from income tax cuts were somewhat offset by increases in MSP premiums for middle-income groups, as much as half of a percent of income. But as “head tax” MSP premiums inevitably shrink as a share of income as income rises. So much so that for the top 1% the difference between 2000 and 2010 is negligible (and rounds to zero).

- Finally, it may seem like somewhat of a "dog bites man" story. But Glen McGregor catches Sun Media fabricating outrage against the CBC.

[Edit: fixed sizing on chart.]

On delayed reactions

It's bad enough that the National Post is so eager to present a fawning take on the Cons' dumb-on-crime legislation. But in presenting another point of view, it apparently hasn't bothered to take into account which party actually makes up Canada's official opposition - neglecting to mention the NDP while including this:

‘‘We remain unwavering in our commitment to fighting crime and protecting Canadians so that our communities are safe places for people to live, raise their families and do business,’’ said Pamela Stephens, spokesperson for Justice Minister Rob Nicholson. “We will be bringing forward comprehensive tackling-crime legislation to be passed within 100 days. Further details will be announced in due course.”

The Liberals, until recently the Official Opposition, claim crime has fallen in volume and severity in the past few years, and that the legislation simply goes too far. They argued that the United States, with its “mega prisons,” is suffering from the effects of this sort of tough-on-crime legislation.

And likewise, QMI's exclusive opportunity to cheerlead for the Cons' F-35 debacle-in-the-making includes the past official opposition rather than the present one:

But critics have blasted the Conservative government for agreeing to buy the jets in what they allege was a sole-source deal, and worry the estimated production and service costs will balloon.

The Liberals vowed that if they formed a government, they would scrap the deal and hold a competitive bid to replace Canada's fighter jets.

So what seems more likely: is Canada's media just too lazy to find any quotes on the same topics from the party actually preferred by voters to challenge the Cons? Or is it making a conscious choice to try to shut out Canada's official opposition?

Saturday Morning Links

Plenty of good news for your weekend reading.

- When even Chantal Hebert can't help but to acknowledge the NDP's surge in Quebec, you know something significant is afoot:

By the time the election was called, the NDP had already overtaken the other federalist parties for second place among francophone voters.

Four weeks later, Layton has cracked the glass ceiling that insulated the Bloc Québécois from the federalist pack. He could not have achieved that without a hand from Gilles Duceppe.

Fatigue with the Bloc has been a recurring trend in Quebec for the best part of a decade. In this campaign, Duceppe’s tired approach has played to that feeling.

The old Gilles Duceppe would not have spent the first week of a campaign talking about how Stephen Harper had made a tentative deal with the Bloc to oust Paul Martin from power in 2004.

He would have realized that, for many Quebec voters, the salient point of his Ottawa insider’s narrative was that the Bloc had actively entertained the notion of accelerating Harper’s rise to government.

Duceppe’s call may have been in the spirit of the times in 2004 but two Conservative mandates later it is Layton’s decision to opt out of Harper’s opposition boat that comes across as prescient to many Quebec voters.

The 2011 French-language election debate will go down as the first that a Bloc leader did not win hands down. Duceppe had to share the honours with Layton and it was an uneven split in the latter’s favour.

- Which is just one more indication that the NDP is, in Dr. Dawg's words, smashing the Matrix:

The polls are now consistent over time: the NDP is surging, even in second place, and it’s not losing momentum. Prisoners no more, Canadian electors are learning that, even under the antiquated, undemocratic “first past the post” electoral system, their votes may well count after all.
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The NDP juggernaut is sweeping on, crushing smug assumptions and leaving a trail of bruised pundits’ egos in its wake. Canadians are taking the red pill at last—and there’s not a damned thing the usual media suspects can do about it.

- While Murray Mandryk ends up being too generous to Brad Wall, he does ask some rather important questions about Wall's ill-advised posturing on the federal election:

(W)hat service is Wall providing Saskatchewan voters by repeating Harper's talking point that whichever party gets the most seats wins - even if that single party doesn't get a majority of the 308 House of Commons seats?

Where in either our constitution or our 1,000-year Parliamentary democracy tradition has Wall found this gem of democratic enlightenment? Why is being governed by a coalition government formed by two parties with 60 per cent of House of Commons seats a worse case of "overturning democracy" than being ruled by a single party with 40 per cent of Parliament's seats? Wasn't Wall's Sask. Party a "coalition" that "overturned democracy" by seizing opposition in 1997? Wasn't that against the rules? How is any government - minority or majority - having unfettered power for a specific period even healthy?

Really, sir, when you reach the point where you're arguing Canadians desperately need the stability of a majority government to deal with the current economic instability driven by the horrors of rising oil prices (I kid you not - this is what a premier of Saskatchewan told reporters Thursday), isn't it time to step back and rethink your position?

- At least one business expert is working on convincing Canadians that a Harper majority would be the absolute worst possible outcome for our country's economy:

Mintzberg’s critique of the Harper government has less to do with specific policy positions than with an attitude that he sees as embodying the same unhealthy values that dominated the presidency of George W. Bush. Some key elements are the glorification of overpaid corporate leaders and short-term profits. That’s tied to the denigration of government’s role in providing a regulatory and socially conscious counterweight to business.

The U.S. financial crash and its devastating recession were directly related to this skewed view of the world, Mintzberg believes. As a result of Canada’s having followed a different path, with more willingness to let government regulate financial institutions, “we’re doing better than the Americans,” with an economy that suffered far less and unemployment that’s lower.

- And finally, Tabatha Southey skewers the predictably embarrassing start for Sun News Network:

Sun TV has come unstuck in time. It’s as if, in its first few days, its pundits felt that they had a duty to diligently cover all the events they had missed before it existed. It’s a news network for the recently cryogenically unfrozen, who may be lying in bed and wondering about this Fidel Castro guy or the CBC “Vote Compass” story that was exhausted weeks ago.
...
So far, Sun TV is a network about being a network. It spent most of its first day congratulating itself for being there and most of its second day retelling its nascent creation myth with telethon-esque levels of self-regarding pathos, full of awe at the amazing odds its staff feels it overcame to make it to air.

That’s right: all the triumphalism of pirate radio, with absolutely none of the cool.
...
My son came downstairs while I was watching Sun TV. Fifteen minutes into his oatmeal, not five years from voting age, he laughed and said, “Wow, they’re like little kids who’ve built a cardboard fort, and now they’re pretending dragons are attacking it.”

Exactly.

On noxious leaks

Shorter Warren Kinsella:

Since there's absolutely nothing worth criticizing about what the NDP is actually saying and doing, allow me to bash them for what I think they might say and do.

Greatest Canadian vs. Worst News Source In The World

Shorter Fox News North:

Oh, how we hoped that fifty years of covert RCMP surveillance would give us some dirt on Tommy Douglas beyond the same tired attacks that have been duly mocked for decades. But no such luck. So who's up for another round of the same tired attacks that have been duly mocked for decades?

Deep thought

Lucky for Brian Lilley his spin doesn't have to meet the standards of accuracy and accountability he's so eager to use as weapons against the CBC.