Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Bill McGuire discusses what the next few decades figure to look like as what's currently considered extreme heat becomes all too normal. And Andrew Gregory reports on the growing recognition that the damage caused by the climate breakdown includes the accelerated spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  

- Stella Levantesi writes about the myth of "green oil" promulgated by Norway's oil industry - which applies equally to greenwashing in Canada's fossil fuel sector. And the Sierra Club points out that a strong plurality of Canadians want to see stronger climate action including a strengthened industrial carbon price - even as Mark Carney goes in the opposite direction. 

- Chris Hoffman discusses the problems with online age verification requirements even in the hands of well-meaning organizations and officials. And Matt Novak writes about new polling showing strong U.S. public opposition to surveillance pricing.  

- Nico Schmidt, Ella Joyner and Conor O'Carroll highlight how tech giants have lobbied to conceal basic facts about the environmental damage done by data centres. And Don Moynihan writes that the Trump regime's sense of entitlement to total secrecy and impunity has reached the stage of demanding a non-disclosure agreement from every single U.S. federal employee. 

-  Finally, Wes Streeting rebuts Blair's demand that human well-being be left entirely in the hands of distorted and irrational markets rather than being a crucial purpose of democratic government. 

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Bruce Livesey discusses Tony Blair's role in corporatizing social democracy. And Stephen Elliott-Buckley writes that there's little reason to listen to the policy prescriptions of a financial elite class which is conspicuously ensuring that its future bears no resemblance to that of the general population.

- Jane Taber interviews Donald Savoie about the importance of our public service - and the decline it's seen in recent years:

What happened?

It was wrong to think that we could make the public sector look like the private sector. Well, frankly, it started with Margaret Thatcher. She arrived in 1980 and she said, ‘I don’t want bureaucrats to tell me what I ought to do to do in terms of policy. We won a majority mandate so we will define policy. What I want the bureaucracy to be good at is to be good managers.’ Mandarins are not known to be good managers. So when Thatcher arrived and said, ‘I want you to become better managers,’ she drew a blank. They didn’t have any ideas about management. So, she said, ‘Right, I am going to go to the private sector.’ So, she got a lot of private sector advisors in as did Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney. We didn’t realize that the private sector plays by its own rules and businesses are good at what they do but they don’t have to deal with 12 officers of Parliament, they don’t have to deal with the [media]. The private sector remedy did not work. It demoralized the public sector.

Why should we care?

Show me a weak country and I will show you a country with a weak public service. Every country needs a referee and the referee has to be the public service. No country can operate without a referee. You take the public service out of Canadian society and you will have chaos.

- pogge discusses what looks to be a glaring loophole in Canada's Access to Information Act - as a recent decision has determined that a government institution can delay an initial reply indefinitely without recourse. Meanwhile, Pat Martin is leading the charge to fix a few additional problems with our access-to-information legislation. And Newfoundland and Labrador are conducting a thorough review of their legislation - albeit only after the government rammed through highly dubious changes which made the system far more opaque than it was before.

- Alison contrasts the Cons' cringeworthy partisan ads against Elections Canada's entirely unobjectionable messages about voting which the Cons want to ban.

- Finally, Thomas Ponniah discusses the founding and first steps of the Tommy Douglas Institute.