Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Jim Stanford reminds us that any drama as to whether Canada's budget will be balanced this year is entirely of the Cons' own making through pointless tax slashing:

Running spending cuts since 2011 now total more than $14-billion a year. Canadians experience real consequences from those cuts every day: shuttered veterans’ offices, deteriorating statistical data, questionable railway and food safety, ridiculous waits for statutory benefits and more. Federal government employment has plunged by 47,000 jobs since 2011 – explaining much of Canada’s lousy job-market performance. These sacrifices were not necessary. Worse yet, the government is throwing away the savings with its tax-cut agenda.

Indeed, if the government truly believed that balancing the books was the most important priority, we could be back in the black right now, never mind next year. Before opening the cookie jar in October for income-splitting and other giveaways, Ottawa was headed for a $3.3-billion surplus for the fiscal year ending March 31. Falling oil prices knocked $1.2 billion off that balance, according to the PBO, leaving a $2.1-billion surplus. But the government spent $3.2-billion on the immediate first-year cost of the tax cuts – pushing itself back, incredibly, into deficit. Without the tax cuts, the budget would already be balanced, even with low oil prices.

It’s not prudent to count your chickens before they hatch. The Conservatives were so anxious to lock in tax cuts and corner the opposition that they consciously pushed the budget back into the red. Now, with plunging oil, that deficit looks bigger. No wonder Finance Minister Joe Oliver is delaying his budget.

- Tavia Grant reports on how the shredding of the long-form census has created serious data quality issues for. But the Cons may not have noticed in light of their propensity for ignoring any evidence which doesn't fit their political plans.

- Jennifer Ditchburn reports that Canada's independent offices of Parliament want nothing to do with the Cons' plans to disqualify anybody with an interest in government from seeking to improve it. And Doug Howat notes how the bill fits into the Cons' wider pattern of trying to attack messengers rather than defending policy choices.

- Charles Blow calls for the U.S. to take much-needed action to reduce child poverty. But Bryce Covert notes once again that any economic growth is being funnelled into the pockets of the 1% rather than benefiting the general public.

- Finally, Helena Smith reports on Syriza's first days in office and Greece, and notes that we now have confirmation that a government can deliver on transformative promises.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Ralph Surette highlights the dangers of a pollution-based economy which fails to account for the damage we're doing to our planet and its ability to provide food for people:

This is something to behold. A more-or-less hurricane in early July. Has anyone ever seen such a thing?

This is climate change, and it's getting worse. And whereas the news of the day is about people with the power out, the long-term story is about the hit to agriculture, now and in future, here and worldwide -- keeping in mind that farming is more than an "economic sector." It's the food supply.
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This is the story all over, as agriculture, always up and down, has become a wild, unpredictable ride through floods, droughts, storms, killing heatwaves, heat-related pest infestations and other hazards. In some places -- drought-ridden California being the prime example -- the scary question is whether agriculture there is simply finished for good.
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What to do? As with our pollution-based economy generally, the answer is one we and our established systems resist ferociously: to change our ways. The experts point out that a third to half of food is actually wasted and mere increased efficiency, especially energy efficiency, in the food system -- from the farm to us -- would work wonders. Only 43 per cent of the world's grains are consumed directly by humans. The same applies to the other part of the food system, fisheries. A staggering figure in that regard is this: of the 110 to 130 million tonnes of fish caught worldwide annually, 30 million tonnes is discarded at sea -- the same amount as goes to fishmeal to feed farmed fish. Is this as impossible to change as it seems?

- Meanwhile, Tavia Grant discusses the health effects of climate change.

- Laura Broadley reports that Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. is now grudgingly admitting that its in situ oil extraction may be contributing to ongoing and still-unexplained oil spills. (As a friendly reminder, that's exactly the type of oil exploitation the Cons have declared to be immune from environmental assessment.) And Jessica McDiarmid writes about Windsor's fight to be able to protect its citizens from hazardous goods being shipped by rail.

- Gloria Galloway reports on the threat to Canada's national parks from unfettered resource development and a woeful lack of public investment.

- David Climenhaga points out that the Cons' latest spin on TFWs seems designed to allow low-pay zones wherever an employer wants to avoid offering a fair wage to Canadian workers.

- Finally, Shannon Gormley rightfully questions why equal pay for women is still projected to be a lifetime away:

Seventy-five years. According to an Oxfam report released Sunday, that’s how long it will take until women in G20 countries can earn, stow away and waste as much as the men who, right now, probably sign their paycheques. In no G20 country does women’s pay reach 80 per cent of men’s.

Before we get into how to save time (and money) — listen. That sound you hear is the sound of conservatives everywhere uttering a secret hope masked as insight: “Progress is slow,” these anti-progressives say, with a smugly wizened intonation peculiar to the type of man who smokes a pipe and has another man shave him with a straight razor.

Of course, 75 years isn’t slow. Turtles are slow; 75 years is an actual, honest-to-God lifetime. Seventy-five years is longer than it took a large chunk of Germany to go from being fascist to communist to capitalist. Longer than it took people to go from using typewriters to computers the size of living rooms to computers they wear on their eyeballs. Longer than it took Americans to go to the moon and then back again and then decide they didn’t feel like going to the moon anymore. Seventy-five years are about as many years as most of us will ever have.

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(W)omen who ask for raises, promotions and other career opportunities aren’t just denied what they want, they’re punished for asking: whether they ask “nicely” or assertively, whether they ask in writing or in person and, most remarkably, whether the person they ask is a man or another woman. Women’s bias against other women is a particularly clear indication that we can’t wait for our subconscious minds to change. We need to change systems and structures and let our minds catch up.

That’s Oxfam’s answer. In Canada, where “progress has stalled to a halt over the past two decades,” and only 57 per cent of women have been employed full-time over the past five years compared to 76 per cent of men, change has to mean national low-fee day care, which has given Quebec more money than it has cost, and no more public service cuts, which disproportionately affect women. Globally, it must mean equal pay legislation, non-discriminatory taxation, and paid parental leave.