Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Jim Stanford examines how a national child-care program would boost Canada's post-COVID recovery and rebuilding. And Michael Roberts points out the value of being able to manufacture vaccines and vital goods for ourselves, rather than depending on foreign corporations for public health necessities.

- Nick Falvo discusses how our current social programs are set up to be grossly insufficient for single people. And Max Fawcett writes about the future of any middle class in Canada - including the need to define its well-being in terms of quality of life rather than material ownership (particularly where that's financed by debt).

- Matthew Remski offers a warning as to what to expect as Qanon and related conspiracy theories spread in Canada. And tcnorris discusses the connection between systematic errors in U.S. polling and the fomenting of distrust in institutions by Donald Trump and his followers. 

- The remarxist examines the ongoing grift that is the manufactured culture of western alienation - which is of course creating a fertile breeding ground for the most dangerous kinds of wingnuttery. And Mitchell Anderson discusses how Jason Kenney's obsession with oil interests and right-wing identity politics over people's well-being has proven disastrous for Alberta in a pandemic. 

- Finally, Patricia Treble discusses the community buy-in which has enabled the Atlantic provinces to suppress COVID-19 - and thus regain some social and economic normalcy. 

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Brigid Delaney writes about the significance of the truth about climate breakdown. Graham Readfearn reports on the risk of outright firestorms as bush fires burn out of control. And Geoff Dembicki writes about a case from the Philippines seeing oil companies held responsible for the damage they've caused from a human rights perspective.

- Linda McQuaig highlights the absurdity of the financial sector whining about having been handed $15 billion in bonuses:

(D)espite their privileged perch, Canada’s big six banks have gotten away with paying extremely low taxes — the lowest in the G7. Partly by using tax havens, our wildly profitable banks have managed to reduce their taxes to a rate that is about one-third of the rate paid by other Canadian businesses, according to a 2017 Toronto Star investigation.

Some Canadians might wonder whether we are well served by our banks. In recent years, they’ve shut down branches across the country, leaving hundreds of rural and remote communities without a local branch. They’ve also declined to offer banking services to many low-income people, obliging almost two million Canadians a year to pay the hair-raising interest rates charged by payday loan operators.

Yet, proposals that Canada Post offer banking services at its 6,200 outlets across the country have been opposed by the big banks, which insist that they serve Canadians well.

Certainly they serve themselves well, with even a “bleak” year leaving bankers divvying up $15 billion in compensation, on top of their base salaries.

- Meanwhile, Jack Lakey writes that Doug Ford's campaign for corporate impunity includes an "ag gag" law seeking to criminalize anybody exposing the mistreatment of animals.

- Finally, PressProgress traces the third-party money used for Jason Kenney's benefit back to just two wealthy donors who attempted to route it through nearly 20 entities to avoid attention, while also offering an introduction to the corporate elites behind the Cons' party fund. And Alvin Finkel writes that "western alienation" is mostly a matter of elites seeking to provide an alternate enemy to the people they're exploiting.

On legacies

For all the campaign talk about how this year's election campaign could have proven a parallel of the 1972 result, we've instead ended up seeing Justin Trudeau repudiate his father's response to another contentious result.

When he won a majority government in 1980 which lacked representation from the western provinces, Pierre Trudeau - to his credit - made an effort to seek cooperation from MPs in the region on a specific means to remedy the problem.

Faced with a regional wipeout along with the potential instability of a minority Parliament, Justin is instead responding by rejecting any form of structural cooperation whatsoever.

Instead, he's insisting that the same platform which underpinned his party's prairie losses is somehow a response to their cause - while planning to try to govern through perpetual games of chicken in Parliament like his most recent Liberal prime ministerial predecessor. And any outreach to the areas lacking representation is being limited to closed-door political maneuvering which figures to be as ineffective as it is cynical.

That sets up a thoroughly unflattering comparison between Justin and his father. And it certainly won't do anything to make the Trudeau name any less toxic for many.

Leadership 2017 Links

The latest from the federal NDP's leadership campaign.

- Several of the candidates have been doing plenty of touring over the past week. And while not all the stops have included media coverage, you'll find features about Charlie Angus from Timmins, Sudbury (X2), North Bay, and Red Deer, along with Weyburn This Week's report on Niki Ashton's visit and the Hill Times' interview with Guy Caron.

- Meanwhile, Peter Julian has been very active in British Columbia's provincial campaign as it draws to a close.

- Joan Bryden's report on fund-raising at the federal level features a look at the early returns from the leadership campaign - including the surprising fact that Julian is in a fairly distant fourth place to date despite seemingly being ahead of the game in most other aspects of campaign organization:

New Democrat leadership contenders raised an additional $252,664. Of the four declared candidates so far, Charlie Angus led the pack with $110,765, followed by Niki Ashton with $65,521, Guy Caron with $57,235 and Peter Julian with $19,143.

- And Beatrice Britneff and Kyle Duggan follow up with a look at who's donated so far.

- Tom Parkin discusses the populist outsider element being brought to the campaign by Pat Stogran. And Marcel Nelson examines the relationship between populism and the NDP, while raising some questions about whether it represents the best choice for the party.

- Supriya Dwivedi offers some suggestions for Jagmeet Singh in building a national campaign that accounts for Quebec voters. And Parkin offers his take (along with advice from Brian Topp and Sally Housser) on how the next leader can earn support in Western Canada.

- Finally, Brittany Andrew-Amofah suggests that whatever the results of the leadership race, the NDP should be able to unite behind the theme of calling out the Libs' faux progressivism.

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Chrystia Freeland comments on the disproportionate influence of the super-rich in a democratic system which is supposed to value citizens equally:

“I think most Americans believe in the idea of political equality,” Callahan told me. “That idea is obviously corrupted when in 2012, one guy, Sheldon Adelson, can make more political donations than the residents of 12 states put together.”

The Demos study draws in part on the quantitative research of Martin Gilens, a professor of politics at Princeton University and author of “Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America.” Gilens, who focused on the divide between the top 10 percent and everyone else, found a high degree of what he calls political inequality.

“I looked at lots of survey data that indicated what people at different income levels wanted the government to do, and then I looked at what the government did,” Gilens explained.

“For people at the top 10 percent, you could predict what the government would do based on their preferences,” he said. “But when the preferences of people at lower income levels diverged from the affluent, that had no impact at all on the policies that were adopted. That was true not only for the poor but for the middle class as well.”

Gilens is a social scientist who is careful to stick to his data. But he told me he was “definitely surprised by the extent of the inequality.”

“If you value democracy, if you value the ability of people at all levels of income to shape government, which is what it means to be a democracy, then, yes, you should be very worried,” he said.

- Michael Smyth discusses the chaos surrounding the B.C. Libs, who aren't having any particular success running damage control after using public resources for a partisan ethnic voter strategy. And even one of Gordon Campbell's former chiefs of staff is pointing out that a combination of untrustworthy government and transparent corporate interference is only making the NDP look all the better by comparison.

- I'm not sure there's ever going to be much basis for confidence in the Northern Gateway pipeline. But an Enbridge witness trying to make the case that oil spills would be good for northern B.C. doesn't exactly inspire confidence that the project's backers are taking the dangers of a spill seriously.

- Finally, Noah Evanchuk wonders whether the Cons' stranglehold on much of western Canada is as safe as most pundits seem to presume - and notes that a track record of patronage and waste like the one amassed by the Harper Cons tends to give rise to a backlash on the prairies:

For two decades, Conservatives have been able to campaign in Alberta and Saskatchewan as Hill outsiders, vowing to go to Ottawa to “stand up” for the region. This “nail ‘em up” ethos has a long history in Western Canada and, going back to Louis Riel and the Red River Rebellion, no area of Canada has as consistently sent non-traditional parties to the House of Commons as Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Hot-button issues like the Liberal long gun registry and the Firearm Act allowed the Conservatives to tap into deep regional dissatisfaction with Ottawa. Their consistent dominance on the Prairies has fooled some Ottawa-based commentators into thinking the area is a lost cause for the NDP.

But the winds are changing direction for Tom Mulcair and the NDP in the West, where — along with the changing demographics that have given rise to the Idle No More movement — they will be taking seats directly from Conservatives, and electing a truly national NDP government in the process.

On regional impacts

Back here, I pointed out the prairie numbers from Forum Research's poll about Canada's federal leaders as an indication that the NDP has plenty of opportunity to grow after electing Thomas Mulcair as leader. But Volkov points out the fact that the NDP's chances of making major gains in western Canada look even better based on Forum's party preference data:



That's right: at least one poll reflecting immediate reactions to Mulcair shows a 44-41 lead for the NDP in Manitoba and Saskatchewan which would flip a dozen seats from Con to NDP hands, along with 30%+ support for the NDP in every region of the country (including Alberta which would see three more seats go to the NDP).

Of course, the usual caveats about a single poll apply. But at the very least, there's little evidence that western voters see the NDP's direction under Mulcair as any less a plus than the rest of Canada. And if the Cons are indeed forced to play defence in the West, that should work wonders for the NDP's ability to win over voters in what looks to be the ultimate battleground of Ontario.

New column day

Here, responding to plenty of talk about the rising West with a look at the challenges and decisions we're facing as a region.

For sources and further reading, the column refers to...
- Data on price and quantity of goods from Stephen Gordon
- B.C. economic comparison from the now-defunct Progress Board via Don Cayo
- Inequality data from Statistics Canada provincially and John Myles (via Gillian Steward) municipally;
- Vacancy rate information from CMHC
- Poverty data from Statistics Canada via Ainslie Cruickshank
- And finally, information on Alberta's Heritage Fund from Alberta Finance.

Just wondering...

...but since nobody seems to have thought to ask even as Brad Wall has used it as his pretext for a trip to China, there are a couple of questions crying out for answers about the Wall government's relationship with B.C. and Alberta.

If the goal in establishing a "partnership" is simply to brand Western Canada's resources on a regional basis in travelling abroad, then why in the world has membership in the club been limited to those provinces willing to sign away their right to democratic government? And isn't it downright negligent of the Campbell, Stelmach and Wall to have refused to invite, say, Manitoba to participate as well if the primary goal involves building links for the region?

An emerging consensus

Murray Mandryk points out yet another area where the Cons are backtracking on a promise to rural western Canada, as they appear to be siding with CN Rail to preserve a severely one-sided set of transportation regulations:

For a while last spring, it actually looked as if Harper's new Conservative MPs in the West were making headway in the long-standing issue of regulatory transportation reform in the grain-handling industry.

"We felt we were making very good progress," said Wade Sobkowich, executive director of the Winnipeg-based Western Grain Elevator Association, in a recent interview.

The association representing all the western grainhandlers, including Agricore United, Cargill Ltd., James Richardson International Ltd., Louis Dreyfus Canada Ltd., Parrish & Heimbecker Ltd., Paterson Global Foods Inc., the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and the Weyburn Inland Terminal Ltd., had even successfully solicited support from the mining, forestry and petroleum industries on a package of regulatory and legislative reforms, Sobkowich said.

Also onside were western Conservative MPs, including the dozen from Saskatchewan, who -- according to Sobkowich -- vowed they were equally determined to address the "shortfalls, inefficiencies and failures" of the railway system affecting grainhandlers. Those problems are too numerous to list, Sobkowich said, but one big regulatory issue has been ensuring that rail companies face the same penalties as grainhandlers.

For example, grainhandlers have a mere 24-hour period to load 100-car unit trains, he explained. (You may recall that one of the railways' arguments for the demise of the country elevator system was the better servicing of the more efficient unit trains). Failure to meet these obligations results in penalties or loss of incentives, which means inland terminals can't take deliveries during that period.

However, if the rail companies don't supply the unit trains on the day they are required, grain companies wind up losing deliveries for a day or three. Yet the railways don't face reciprocal penalties...

(W)hile the federal government seemed initially eager to implement the changes, that quickly changed early last summer and the changes have not been adopted, Sobkowich said.

Now, the Conservative government and Transport Canada are suggesting that the grainhandling companies should reach a consensus before any such changes regulatory changes are implemented.

So what happened? Sobkowich won't speculate. But it's worth noting that CN Rail made it known early last summer that it opposed these changes. It's also worth noting that CN is headquartered in Quebec, where Transport Canada Minister Lawrence Cannon resides. It's also worth noting that Quebec is where Harper's Conservatives want to win more seats...

Sound familiar? It should. This is the exact tactic the federal government is using over its promise to Saskatchewan to remove non-renewable resources from the equalization formula. Make a promise to West and when it displeases eastern interests, claim it can't be kept because there's no consensus.

Sadly, it's the same old story.

Needless to say, there doesn't appear to be any particular reason for CN to offer its support to a consensus aimed at reducing its current advantage over its customers. Which means that the Cons' excuse will likely ensure that the current "shortfalls, inefficiencies and failures" continue as long as the Cons remain in power.

Now, it's well and good to seek consensus on an issue to the extent reasonably possible. But I don't recall anything in the Cons' platform about refusing to take any action which couldn't be agreed to by all affected parties. And rightly not, given the near-certainty that any issue will involve competing interests where it's impossible to completely satisfy all sides.

Nor could one find a similar principle in the Cons' actions in government, as dissenters have typically been excluded from decision-making processes (and their interests largely ignored, if not outright mocked).

In fact, even on equalization the Cons have made clear their intention of imposing a final result in the absence of consensus. But of course, that end result is one which appears likely to prioritize blatant politicking in other provinces over the promises the Cons made to the West.

Which leaves only the question of whether prairie voters will recognize the pattern and reach their own consensus that the Cons' word is worth absolutely nothing. And the more times the Cons show their continued disdain for their own promises, the more likely that outcome becomes.