Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher keep up their reporting on Robocon by noting that Elections Canada's trail seems to have gone cold with the use of an unsecured wifi connection to hide the identity of Pierre Poutine. But as Susan Delacourt points out, that fact only confirms that the Cons' election fraud seems to have been rather deliberately planned to escape detection.

- Meanwhile, Delacourt also laments the effect of "churnalism" in which the media serves largely as a conduit for government or business talking points:

Harper has not held a news conference around Parliament Hill since 2009 and has succeeded in drawing strict limits around media access to his government. “It’s not that he hates the media,” one Conservative MP said to me earlier this year. “It’s more that he has no respect for them.”

Why has this worked so well for Harper? Probably because the public buys the idea, frequently put forward by the Conservatives and their allies, that the media is little more than a delivery system for the “spin” the politicians like to spout.

Watching most of those MP panels on TV, or wading into the daily scrums in the foyer of the Commons, it’s hard to disagree with that assessment. That’s not debate we’re seeing — it’s just people reciting well-rehearsed lines, speaking past each other, and certainly not answering any questions.

In the print realm, meanwhile, politicians and their handlers are now fond of replying to media questions with sparse, fact-free emails, timed to arrive just before deadline, so there is no opportunity for follow-up or subsequent queries.

All of this has been rightly dubbed “churnalism” — the practice in which journalists simply take the PR material handed to them and churn it out to their readers or viewers.
...
Any solution, though, is going to have to address this issue of the “churn” and the spin. It won’t be easy. By any rough count, the growing number of communications professionals on Parliament Hill (about 1,500 in government alone, according to a Hill Times tally) vastly outpaces the ranks of the media (around 400 in the press gallery, and shrinking, it seems, monthly.)

The number that should focus the collective media mind, however, is that 78 per cent figure south of the border — all those people who now view political reporting in the same, dim light as they view the politicians.

And that may not be because the media is the enemy of politicians, but because it’s grown too accommodating to the spin and talking points.

- And on a related note, Peter O'Neil learns not to take the self-serving statements of dirty oil advocates at face value.

- Irene Mathyssen discusses why the Cons' push for privatized pensions doesn't figure to provide retirement security for Canadians:

The regulations surrounding the administration of PRPPs are yet to be established; but unless the cost of administration is low, and unless the pooled amount of investment is high -- which is unlikely given the non-mandatory nature of the plan -- PRPPs will not be any more relevant as a retirement savings option to Canadian workers than RRSPs. In other words, the banks will profit and workers will continue to struggle to make ends meet before and after retirement.

The voluntary nature of this savings plan is not the only drawback. PRPPs as a retirement savings vehicle function like RRSPs. They are taxed on withdrawal and affect net eligibility for Old Age Security (OAS). PRPPs and RRSPs only serve middle- to high-income earners (those averaging wages of $50,000 or more) at retirement. Workers making less actually run the risk having their income drop to below poverty levels at retirement because of the fact that their PRPP income is taxed and clawed back from OAS eligibility.

- Finally, Bob Hepburn documents the remarkable story of the McGuinty Libs releasing outdated and inaccurate data as an excuse to close Ontario Place just as it was in danger of proving a smashing success.

Musical interlude

Deadmau5 - Faxing Berlin

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- pogge offers up the definitive response to the Cons' attempt to encourage a sell-off of First Nations reserve land:

When you look past the paternalistic argument that the only way First Nations communities can possibly thrive is to be more like us, this is what's left:

...businesses that want to unlock the economic potential of reserves, from real estate development to forestry and mining, need the legal certainty that a property regime makes possible.

In this context, "unlock the economic potential" looks very much like a euphemism for "streamline the regulatory and tax regime to make it as easy as possible for us to suck all the wealth out." We've been unlocking our own economic potential since around the time Reagan was elected president south of the border. We've unlocked so much economic potential that we now live in the Age of Austerity because all the money is stashed in offshore accounts. If the First Nations have any sense, they'll tell us to get stuffed.

- Meanwhile, FSIN notes that the Cons are slashing funding for First Nations housing.

- If we haven't yet turned every public service into a Con crony's profit stream, it isn't for a lack of trying - with the administration of public benefits programs looming as the next area to be handed over to the corporate sector. But there are some pieces of the Cons' work that are too dirty for even the most anti-social corporation to take on.

- The Victoria Times Colonist and Graham Thomson are duly skeptical about Stephen Harper's claim to be the slightest bit interested in science in determining whether or not to force the Gateway pipeline on B.C. And if we needed another reminder of how distant science is from the Cons' spin on the environment, Marc Lee highlights a few of the more glaring holes in the Cons' latest report on greenhouse gas emissions:

The report creates an alternative “do nothing” scenario that leads to surging emissions of 850 Mt in 2020, then subtracts estimates of federal and provincial actions taken to date, which gets us to 720 Mt. That is a lot of spin on the numbers, perhaps hoping few people will bother to read the actual report and just report the government’s line.

But even the 720 Mt number is suspect for a variety of reasons. First, the economic downturn lowers the baseline, with 2010 emissions coming in lower than previously expected. Next, the feds have included land use changes in the calculations for the first time. The decline in forestry activity means more carbon will remain sequestered in Canada’s forests, and this will lower emissions by 26 Mt. Take these out and the 2020 target jumps back to 745 Mt, slightly more than 2005 levels. Then report also arbitrarily lowers emissions from BC’s natural gas sector, relative to National Energy Board projections. And it assumes that proposed regulations yet to be ratified contribute to decreased transportation emissions. And that Saskatchewan implements carbon capture and storage for four new coal-fired power plants.

The other matter is to what extent the feds can take credit for any reductions in various sectors of the Canadian economy. Much of the heavy lifting appears to have been done at the provincial level, including BC’s carbon tax, Quebec’s cap-and-trade regime and Ontario’s phase-out of coal-fired electricity. In transportation, new vehicle regulations are touted but these just copy the new regulations established by the United States. The report makes repeated reference to new regulations being developed for the oil and gas sector, too, but these have been promised for a long time and no draft regulations have yet seen the light of day.

- Finally, Brent Rathgeber makes the case for sitting MPs to stay out of the boundary revision process. Needless to say, his Saskatchewan caucus-mates don't seem interested in listening.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Mitchell Anderson discusses the Ten Commandments that have ensured that Norway's oil wealth is preserved for the benefit of citizens. But it's particularly worth contrasting Norway's philosophy surrounding non-renewable resources against the frenzy to extract everything today at any price (which of course currently dominates western Canadian politics):

Norway was in no rush to develop their oil resources, and determined that it would only be on their own terms with a clear benefit to Norwegians. So strong was this sentiment that an all-party parliamentary white paper itemized "10 commandments" (see sidebar) for oil development, later enshrined into the Norwegian Petroleum Act.
...
When global oil prices shot up in 1974 after the Middle East oil embargo, the Norwegian government decided that a major tax increase was needed to ensure that oil companies would not realize windfall profits at the expense of the Norwegian taxpayer.

Professor Einar Lie at the University of Oslo researched the history of this period and describes how the government used the newly formed Statoil to gather intelligence on how far they could push foreign companies.

"The Norwegian civil servants wanted to squeeze this lemon to the maximum but they did not want to foreign oil companies to leave. So they talked extensively with Statoil, which had a lot of informed contacts with the other oil companies to find out just how much they would be able to take without the foreign companies leaving Norway. They were extremely pragmatic on how to get the maximum taxation."

- Karen Foster points out the gap between the reasonable expectations of younger workers about their ability to retire after putting in several decades of hard work, and the public policy direction set by the Cons and others to ensure that retirement is delayed and rendered less secure.

- Common Dreams documents how workers in the UK have been placed on a private employment blacklist based on suspicions of citizen activism.

- And finally, neither Thomas Walkom nor Craig McInnes buys the Cons' spin that a decision on the Northern Gateway pipeline will be anything but a political calculation by an oil-soaked government.

New column day

Here, on how the mixed-riding proposal of Saskatchewan's federal electoral boundaries commission offers at least some improvement over the current all-rurban mess when it comes to recogizing communities of interest.

For further reading...
- Joe Couture covers both the initial proposal, and reactions from parties and academics.
- Kelly Block's acknowledgment that rural voters in Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar would represent her margin of victory can be found here.
- And again, anybody interested in participating in next month's public hearings should sign up here.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- John Conway discusses the Cons' project of destroying Canada's social safety net.

- But the good news is that Stephen Harper is running into a few roadblocks along the way. For example, the rule of law - as a Federal Court judge has concluded that the Cons' attempt to impose an arbitrator with connections to both their own party and Air Canada to rule on a collective agreement for Air Canada's workers.

- And Thomas Walkom writes that there are limits to what the Cons can impose on the general public in trying to push the Gateway pipeline:

Harper’s hope was that this combination of toughness, smear and crass ideology — particularly if repeated endlessly in the right-wing media — would convince a big chunk of the broad Canadian middle. The strategy does, after all, work in the U.S.
But it hasn’t here. Public opposition to the scheme is so intense in B.C. that even the avowedly pro-business, governing Liberals have joined in.

Add to this the nightmare of aboriginal politics. First Nations along the pipeline route are threatening to tie up the project for years in court — which they can do.

And the broad public? My guess is that, Joe Oliver notwithstanding, most Canadians don’t regard environmentalist David Suzuki, or even B.C. Liberal premier Christy Clark, as dangerous radicals funded by foreign gold.

What they do see is an increasingly shrill federal government whose bully-boy tactics aren’t working.

- Finally, Jordon Cooper comments on the costs of ignoring mental health as a public policy issue:

Across the country we have seen what happens when we underfund mental-health programs. It leads to an increase of people on the streets, it forces police into becoming mental-health workers, and in some situations it leads to deaths. Mental health is a complicated field but until we start to publicly address how we doing, how is it going to get better?

The bar to get help is too high, takes too long, and people end up too close to the edge. We deal a lot with the symptoms in our society - why not tackle the problem directly?

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Crashing cats.

On provisional boundaries

Volkov has already summed up the likely effect of the preliminary Saskatchewan federal riding boundaries released today.

But before we start planning the Regina Lewvan victory party, the most important part of the boundary revision process has yet to play out. So I'll encourage Saskatchewan readers to sign up for next month's public hearings and make clear that the preliminary move away from the current rurban mess makes for a step in the right direction.

On unscientific methods

Scott is absolutely right to be skeptical of the claim that the Cons will let science play any role in their attempt to force a pipeline through northern B.C. - particularly given their general distaste for the subject.

But there's a more direct response worth pointing out to Stephen Harper's ludicrous spin, as it's his government that's decided to make sure that environmental assessment of the Gateway pipeline will be a purely political decision:

The Governor in Council will make the decision on the environmental assessment (whether the project is likely to cause significant adverse effects and if so, whether such effects are justified in the circumstances).

That's right: it was just last week that Harper publicly announced his purely political decision to make sure that nobody associated with either scientific inquiry or public consultation will get any say in determining whether the pipeline will cause "significant adverse effects". And while that doesn't mean anybody can afford not to point out the environmental issues raised by the pipeline (if nothing else for ease of mitigation once the Cons have been safely toppled from office), nobody should be fooled into thinking science is to blame for Harper's poor choices.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- The Star-Phoenix editorial board comments on the need to crack down on tax havens:

(T)he scale of the avoidance Mr. Henry detailed in his report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, drives home just how immoral is the practice of tax avoidance, particularly at a time when even rich countries such as Spain and the United States are staggering under their debt loads and deficits because they can't raise enough tax revenue.

As Gwynne Dyer, a Canadian journalist based in Britain, notes in a recent column published in Embassy magazine, despite efforts by some governments to recoup tax revenues lost offshore, the problem has more than doubled over the last five years just as debt crises and resulting austerity measures have thrown millions out work.

The fact there are relatively few people hiding so much in a relatively few places such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Cayman Islands, and Jersey should make it simple for the international community to exert pressure to collect the taxes that governments are owed.

Since the tax revenue and corrupt funds come from all countries - from small developing nations to outlaw states to the largest economies in the world - a global agreement not only should be possible but imperative.

- But lest anybody think it'll be easy to get the 1% to live up to social obligations, the same Canadian corporate sector that's hoarding giant piles of unused cash is demanding approval not to use its reserves to properly fund employee pensions.

- Even as they claim to have no resources to provide for basic social needs, the Cons have set up a secret torture committee and plan to burn $1 billion on drone warfare. Which means it's no wonder they're so determined to silence anybody who might point out a principled need for action.

- Speaking of which, Don Lenihan and Graham Fox discuss how the Cons have inverted Canadian federalism by refusing to take any responsibility for the public policy areas Canadians care about most:

(T)he federal government seems to have opted for a more transactional approach to governance, concentrating on issues like border security, crime and natural resources. The Harper government seems uncomfortable with complex processes and relationships, so its guiding principle is to keep things as simple as possible.

By contrast, the Council of the Federation (COF) is emerging as a new kind of collaborative forum. The provinces are using it to build and test the strategies and coalitions they think governments need to solve complex issues...

...The provinces, recall, have responsibility for many of the issues that register the least confidence (and highest complexity), such as health, education and other social services.
As a result, the pressure on them to experiment and collaborate is growing exponentially.

This, in turn, is pushing them toward more pan-Canadian approaches, while the federal government, which views its responsibilities as more transactional, is returning to watertight compartments and bilateral relationships.
...
(I)f the provincial effort is even modestly successful, we don’t think the federal government can avoid engaging for long. We believe it has a natural leadership role in this new, pan-Canadian environment. Its networks, infrastructure, resources, and legislative authority would make an essential contribution to solving issues around energy, healthcare and innovation. Eventually, the federal government will have to come back to the table — whether it be this government or some future one.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Moira Herbst is the latest to comment on the connection between the lack of good jobs and an excess of corporate cash hoarding:

(I)t would be refreshing if the pundit-political class considered a radical but obvious idea: tapping the multitrillion-dollar stockpiles of corporate cash currently sitting on the sidelines and benefiting no one. Compulsive hoarding is unhealthy for individuals. It's even worse for whole economies.

The sorry facts are these: job growth is still half of what is needed to keep up with population growth. Meanwhile, more than 14% of the US workforce is unemployed, underemployed or discouraged from looking for work. The numbers for July aren't expected to budge much. Absent a massive inflow of tax dollars, jobs aren't going to come from the public sector. State and local governments are broke, and the fight over federal deficits has turned into an all-out war in Congress.
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It turns out that US-based mega-corporations are hoarding cash. How much cash? Record sums. It's about $1.73tn in US assets, according to the Federal Reserve – 50% more than they held in 2007. When you count worldwide holdings of US companies, the figure is a staggering $5.1tn, estimates Reuters' David Cay Johnston. Apple alone has $117bn.

Banks are also stockpiling cash; they're sitting on more than $1.5tn in excess reserves in the US.

Not only are mega-companies not creating enough decent jobs with this cash, they continue to offshore work and underpay workers. Many are not even rewarding investors or accelerating their growth with the money, thereby causing harm to themselves, according to a recent survey by Ernst & Young. Economists also say that cash hoarding is blocking a recovery in Europe.

- But sadly, Tom Tomorrow makes it clear that nothing can be done:


- It's actually somewhat of a pleasant surprise that at least as of last year, the Cons hadn't yet excised all references to renewable energy from internal briefing notes. But it's all the more shameful that they continue to push a short-term reliance on high-speed, low-safety oil extraction when they can't plead ignorance as an excuse for their neglect.

- And lest there be any doubt, Alberta's drinking water sources and B.C.'s coast aren't the only sensitive areas due for a coating of petrochemical sludge if the Cons get their way.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for a sunny Sunday.

 - Mitchell Anderson's second article on Norway's success in converting oil resources into a massive source of public wealth focuses on the country's history of resistance to outside ownership. But I wouldn't see much reason why Canada couldn't turn its own sense of hard-earned independence from the world's dominant powers (which has always defined our relationships to the U.K. and U.S.) toward our corporate overlords.

- And in a guest post at Progressive Economic Forum, Tony Clark highlights why there's reason to be skeptical of the demands of our oil barons - as a "labour shortage" being used as an excuse for importing disposable foreign labour in fact reflects nothing more than a refusal to share the benefits of a profitable industry with Canadian workers.

- Bruce Johnstone rightly criticizes Stephen Harper's pardons to Customs Act violators for valuing nebulous economic rights far more than the real rights and freedoms his government has attacked while in power.

- Finally, I'm not sure how much circulation Yvonne Marton's profile of Thomas Mulcair's car ownership will receive. But it looks like a neat example of Mulcair fitting into the NDP's set of priorities - focusing on function and value in comparison to the Cons' preference for shiny trinkets.

On connections

Tuesday, July 31 was the deadline for submissions to the Wall government's consultation process on employment and labour law. Like hundreds of other interested individuals and groups, I took the time to put together a submission - based on the underlying view that however biased the process was from the beginning, and however unlikely a bought-and-paid-for government was to listen to anybody who offered ideas to provide a more secure future for Saskatchewan workers rather than seeking to grind them to dust, there's always some value to be found in fostering discussion between citizens and legislators as to how we should be governed.

And many others with positions starkly opposed to the Saskatchewan Party did the same - criticizing Wall for failing to provide a more thorough consultation process, but consistently expressing the view that a responsible government should seek to connect more with its citizens.

Tuesday, July 31 also marked the unveiling of an NDP effort to build on the limited consultation permitted by Wall. So how did Wall's base react to an open channel of communication?

"One of our main activities ... is identifying polls and Twitter feeds that need to go horribly wrong," [Kate McMillan] said in an interview this week. "It's all in good fun, but there's also a political statement being made."

One post the NDP flagged as offensive - "Tommy Douglas, not dead enough" - is a line that has been used for years on her blog, McMillan noted.

"This is all fair in love and war on the Internet ... Anything that's open to the Internet inviting opinions is subject for high traffic, from the left and the right," she added.

"Politicians and parties should stay very clear of social media," she opined. "The only people on Twitter for politics are people who want to hurt you."

Which offers about as clear a contrast as one could imagine. The NDP and its allies responded to a limited consultation exercise with two main messages: a principled argument as to the policy choices involved, and a concern that the government should do more to hear from affected parties.

In contrast, the Saskatchewan Party's authoritarian base considers it an important activity to ensure that any effort to build communication between policy-makers and citizens goes "horribly wrong". Which presumably helps to ensure that policy is designed by and for the few who already enjoy privileged access to a thoroughly-insulated premier, while limiting our political options to shallow personality choices developed within easily-captured top-down party structures.

Unfortunately, the right in Saskatchewan thinks it can get away with more and more extreme attacks on democratic participation based on the province's 2011 election result. And the NDP - having governed largely as a "we're not them" choice for four terms while having few spare resources to dedicate to citizen engagement - still has a long way to go in rebuilding its historic capacity to bring together Saskatchewan voters.

Indeed, relatively modest steps with the Were You Asked? site (such as a simple filter before content submitted to the site was published) would have avoided the easy manipulation by vandals and saboteurs that proved embarrassing last week. And presumably that's a lesson the NDP will need to keep in mind as it decides how to reach out to citizens.

But the more important point is that vandalism and sabotage are indeed part of the value structure of a government and its base looking to keep Saskatchewan's citizens as silent and inactive as possible. And that radical difference in how we value public participation should be one of the NDP's overarching messages as we work on developing more effective forms of engagement.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Jonathan Chait points out how the gap between the citizens hardest hit by a weak economy and a political class which faces virtually none of its effects explains the lack of urgency in dealing with mass unemployment:

The political scientist Larry Bartels has found (and measured) that members of Congress respond much more strongly to the preferences of their affluent constituents than their poor ones. And for affluent people, there is essentially no recession. Unemployment for workers with a bachelors degree is 4 percent — boom times. Unemployment is also unusually low in the Washington, D.C., area, owing to our economy’s reliance on federal spending, which has not had to impose the punishing austerity of so many state and local governments.

I live in a Washington neighborhood almost entirely filled with college-educated professionals, and it occurred to me not long ago that, when my children grow up, they’ll have no personal memory of having lived through the greatest economic crisis in eighty years. It is more akin to a famine in Africa. For millions and millions of Americans, the economic crisis is the worst event of their lives. They have lost jobs, homes, health insurance, opportunities for their children, seen their skills deteriorate, and lost their sense of self-worth. But from the perspective of those in a position to alleviate their suffering, the crisis is merely a sad and distant tragedy. 

- David Atkins follows up on digby's analysis as to how a push for additional handouts to the rich is aimed at insulated today's upper class from the vagaries of luck which helped it to win a privileged position in the first place. But as thwap points out, there are some wealthier citizens who are looking to improve matters for all rather than closing off the path behind them - and we should be happy to encourage that sentiment.

- Meanwhile, Sid Ryan discusses one of the obvious elements of that effort: a focus on "flexible" labour which ensures that ensures most workers have neither reasonable wages nor any job security. (And lest there be any doubt, there's plenty of desire for the latter.) But sadly, far too many anti-worker governments - including Dalton McGuinty's Libs - seem to prefer picking fights with workers to keep them as insecure as possible.

- Finally, Ken MacQueen neatly sums up the Cons' Olympic spirit.

Musical interlude

Way Out West - The Gift (2010 Remix)

Friday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to end your week.

- Tim Harper suggests that the Cons are running out of options to try to push the Gateway pipeline on a thoroughly-opposed public in British Columbia. But in keeping with the Cons' general view of the world as nothing but a public relations problem to be shouted down for financial gain, James Moore and Gwyn Morgan are sure they have the answer: more high-priced spin from Enbridge and other tar-sands operators. And pogge rightly notes that part of the anti-environment strategy figures to include an effort to paint all environmental activism and advocacy as "terrorism".

- Carol Goar comments on the continuing efforts of Canadian doctors to save health care for refugees from the Cons' cuts:

Rashid, a family physician, is one of the founders of Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care, which has vowed to track and report cases of death or serious harm resulting from Kenney’s $20-million-a-year cutback.

It took effect a month ago. But reports already are coming in: a 7-year-old epileptic boy in Hamilton was hospitalized for a severe seizure because he could not get medicine; a woman who had endured multiple rapes after she was sold into the sex trade couldn’t get an ultrasound for the fetus she was carrying; a Colombian man is desperately fundraising to pay Toronto General Hospital for life-saving abdominal surgery; two refugee claimants in Ottawa — one Peruvian, the other El Salvadoran — have stopped taking their post-traumatic stress medications.

By fall, the doctors hope to have a compendium of cases from across the country. A local delegation of medical workers will show up every time a cabinet minister makes an announcement, the government calls a news conference or Parliament holds public hearings to highlight specific cases. “None of us wants to disrupt meetings, but we really feel we have no choice,” said Tim O’Shea of McMaster University, who works as a medical consultant at the Shelter Health Network in Hamilton.

Since April, the doctors have been asking Kenney for a meeting on this issue. So far he has refused.

- Meanwhile, the Star rightly points out that the Cons' thoroughly-discredited finger-pointing over Attawapiskat did nothing to help the underlying housing crisis.

- Finally, the Star-Phoenix weighs in on the need for some answers about Robocon:

It is rare for Elections Canada officials to speak out about investigations before they are concluded, and the agency receives dozens of complaints after every election. Often it takes years to clear these files.

But the allegations that voters in some ridings received socalled robocalls misdirecting them to wrong voter stations, or calls from people alleging to be from particular parties who acted in an obnoxious or insulting manner in an apparent attempt to discourage their votes, is a little more serious than candidates complaining their signs have been defaced.

If these allegations are true, it strikes to the heart of Canada's electoral system. For a democratic system to function properly the electoral process must be considered trustworthy. And for a democratic government to rule with authority, the public must have confidence it legitimately came to power.

Juxtaposition

Jim Flaherty...

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Monday new rule changes to define "suitable employment'' and "reasonable'' efforts at finding work have yet to come down, but as far as he's concerned people should be prepared to take pretty well any available job.

"There is no bad job, the only bad job is not having a job,'' he told reporters.

...meet reality:

By 2011, results from a longitudinal study of over 7000 people were being reported, enabling assessment of the effects of moving in and out of jobs of high or low quality. Poor jobs were defined by a suite of characteristics including high demands, low control, unfair pay, and insecurity. The results showed that when people moved from unemployment to a good job there were beneficial effects on their health, but that moving from unemployment to poor jobs was actually detrimental on some health measures. “We find that jobs with poor psychosocial attributes are no better,” wrote the team, “and may have even more adverse effects on mental health, than unemployment.”

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Mitchell Anderson reports on how Norway has assured itself of long-term fiscal security by saving a fair share of its oil resources:

Norway produces 40 per cent less petroleum than Canada and has one-seventh our population, but has saved more than $600 billion in oil revenue and counting. This is equivalent to about 140 per cent of Norwegian GDP, or about $120,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. In contrast, every Canadian is in the red about $16,000 due to our $566-billion national debt.
 
While Canada is eliminating 19,000 public sector jobs in an effort to balance the budget, Norway is debt-free, enjoys full employment and has fourth highest per capita GDP in the world. Canada is twelfth.

Beyond economics, Norway is an obviously fortunate place to live. It is routinely ranked number one in the world on the Human Development Index, is the world's best-governed nation according to the Democracy Index, and is the best country in the world to be a mother.

And in spite of being the world's third largest exporter of crude oil, Norway is ranked number three in the world on the Environmental Performance Index. Canada is thirty-seventh (behind Nicaragua, Albania and Columbia).
...
How is all this paid for? Since the 1970s, Norway as a matter of policy has collected between 70 per cent and 80 per cent of the resource wealth generated from their oil industry through corporate taxes twice as high as Canada, and a special tax on oil profits. In Alberta, royalties collected on all oil sands production in 2010 were 10 per cent of industry revenues.

Norway also required that foreign companies train Norwegian workers, transfer proprietary technologies to their state-owned oil company Statoil, and in some cases even hand over producing oil platforms free of charge after a predetermined period.

This insistence on national participation has paid off. Companies controlled by the Norwegian taxpayer now directly own about 30 per cent of the nation's oil production, providing another significant source of income as well as technical input on how their resource is developed.

 - Michael Harris questions the RCMP's move into environmental politics:

What a remarkable coincidence. The Mounties are worried about those very same radical environmentalists that Natural Resources minister Joe Oliver says want to use foreign money to hijack hearings on the Northern Gateway Pipeline. The same ones that the man who is cornering the market on Fossil Awards, Environment Minister Peter Kent, said might be “laundering offshore foreign funds.” No really, David Suzuki is Meyer Lansky with an electron microscope.

And here I thought the RCMP was about enforcing the criminal code in federal matters, not the government’s energy policies. I wonder if this transforms Christy Clark from a poker-playing politician into a radical environmentalist? I wonder if farmers who opposed ditching the Canadian Wheat Board will show up in some future de-classified RCMP threat assessment for opposing government policy? (Never forget, they have combines.) Or maybe there will even be a thick file on poor scribes critical of corporate wars, sleazy politics, suppressing public information, ministerial mendacity and forbidding Canadian public servants and scientists from speaking?

- Meanwhile, the Cons have made clear that they feel entitled to proclaim their supporters free of any law they don't like. And apparently the rules surrounding honesty and transparency in government advertising are on that list.

- Finally, CTV reports on the latest steps in the New Union Project which could see a merger between the CAW and CEP.

New column day

Here, on how the Gateway pipeline serves as a prime example as to why governments shouldn't be too quick to minimize environmental assessment processes.

For further reading...
- Robyn Allan's latest discussion of the Gateway pipeline is here.
- Kevin Logan documents Christy Clark's position prior to her latest desperate call for attention.
- And David Anderson delivers his view of Enbridge and the Gateway pipeline.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- The presidents of Canada's provincial Federations of Labour highlight how the provinces need to respond to the Harper Cons' efforts to push down wages and trample on workers' rightst:

Canadians need our country’s premiers to denounce this low-wage agenda and stand up for what is in the best interest of working people.

When the premiers meet this fall to discuss the economy, we believe the labour market ought to be front and centre in that discussion. They must denounce the exploitive expansion of the (temporary foreign worker program). They must collectively demand that Ottawa invest more in training to bridge the skills gap, so that unemployed Canadians can fill available jobs.

Premiers should also call for improvements to Canada’s EI program, as fewer than 40 per cent of unemployed Canadians are currently eligible for benefits. We need our premiers to challenge the notion that Canada must increase its retirement age to 67. What’s really needed is pension reform that will allow all Canadians to retire in dignity, such as improving and enhancing CPP. And finally, the premiers should recognize and defend the important role unions play in our society and our economy.

- Meanwhile, following up on yesterday's post, SGEU, CUPE, SUN, the Saskatchewan Building Trades and Rosalee Longmoore all provide their take on the employment and labour law review. And the Saskatchewan NDP plans to carry out real consultations where the Sask Party has fallen short.

- Pat Atkinson notes that Stephen Harper's absentee federalism is producing unintended consequences when it comes to the Gateway pipeline:

A common-sense approach would have had our PM meet with the 13 premiers to hammer out a Canadian energy strategy. And while Harper was at it, he also could have discussed the preservation and reform of medicare and equalization. Instead the premiers were left to grapple with these issues without federal input.

The "my way or the highway" attitude exhibited by Harper on these files, especially health care, underlines the weakness of his government's approach to federalism - attempting to govern Canada by strict adherence to the division of federal and provincial powers. This hasn't worked in the past. It promotes unilateralism, as witnessed by Clark's actions, and it ignores the reality of governing a modern day nation that's dealing with complex and important issues.

B.C.'s move should spur Harper to begin the dialogue of strengthening the unity of this nation through co-operative federalism - an old fashioned but still relevant idea.

The premiers, in the most diplomatic of terms, have invited the prime minister to their next meeting in November. Their message is clear: There are important public issues that will take both the federal and provincial governments to resolve.

- Finally, Heather Mallick reminds us that we should celebrate our legacy of universal health care.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Decked-out cats.

Tuesday Evening Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- George Monbiot discusses the effect of inegalitarian and austerian policies imposed by the UK Conservatives:

(T)he neoliberal programme has closed down political choice. If the market, as the doctrine insists, is the only valid determinant of how societies evolve, and the market is dominated by giant corporations, then what big business wants is what society gets. You can see this squalid reality at work in Cameron's speech last week. "We have listened to what business wants and we are delivering on it. Business said, 'We want competitive tax rates,' so we are creating the most competitive corporate tax regime in the G20 and the lowest rates of corporation tax in the G7 …". What about the rest of us? Don't we get a say?

The neoliberal hypothesis has been disproved spectacularly. Far from regulating themselves, untrammelled markets were saved from collapse only by government intervention and massive injections of public money. Far from delivering universal prosperity, government cuts have pushed us further into crisis. Yet this very crisis is now being used as an excuse to apply the doctrine more fiercely than before.

So where is the economic elite? Counting the money it has stashed in unregulated tax havens. Thirty years of neoliberalism have allowed the super-rich to detach themselves from the lives of others to such an extent that economic crises scarcely touch them. You could see this as yet another market failure. Even if they are affected, the rich are doubtless prepared to pay an economic price for the political benefits – freedom from democratic restraint – that the doctrine offers.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Jackson points out the Canadian Tax Journal's feature on tax-free savings accounts as a gratuitous giveaway to the wealthy.

- Alice takes a look at the fund-raising trends for Canada's political parties, with perhaps the most interesting development coming in some of the names showing up on the NDP's donor list:

(A) quick scan of the party donor lists hints at another part of the explanation. With names like Louise Arbour (if it's the same person, once touted as a potential Liberal leader), and that of a former national campaign director for the Green Party showing up on the NDP's return, it suggests the strategic voting / contributing card is being played by the NDP for a change.

- Linda McQuaig laments the fact that climate change is apparently being treated as something less than newsworthy even in the midst of a summer loaded with extreme weather.

- Finally, Jason Kenney and his staff are coming up with news ways to try to silence anybody who actually cares about the well-being of refugees in Canada. But thankfully the Law Society of Upper Canada wasn't willing to play along with a frivolous complaint which could have served as a precedent to silence professionals across the country.

Employment & Labour Legislation Submission

Plenty of others will be chiming in today on the future of employment and labour law in Saskatchewan; here's my personal contribution.

Many other voices have expressed concerns about the limited amount of actual consultation provided through the within process. My intention is not to merely echo those concerns (however valid), but to take at face value the prospect of improvement to Saskatchewan’s employment and labour legislation.

The same factors which necessitated the passage of labour standards legislation in the 20th century are no less applicable today. Work remains one of the fundamental elements of the lives of most citizens, based on both the income it provides and the social bonds developed in the workplace.

Workers have a strong interest in being able to progress from an entry-level job into a long-term career involving professional and personal development. And the uncertainty of employment markets can be expected to lead to some risk aversion, as workers prefer to maintain a current position rather than changing employers more than necessary.

But at the same time as workers prioritize personal stability and growth, many employers appear inclined to favour disposable labour. This tendency has been assisted by immigration policies expressly intended to facilitate the performance of work by temporary workers whose immigration status is tied solely to the whims of an employer. And so a stark power imbalance remains between employers pushing for the maximum advantage from workers and governments alike, and workers who may see stable employment as an integral part of a full life.

Ideally, the continued imbalance between workers and employers could be reduced substantially through an improved system of social support.

A guaranteed annual income would ensure that workers have some alternative to remaining with a current employer - encouraging workers to pursue options including alternative employment, education or entrepreneurship rather than considering themselves bound to cling to a single job in order to maintain a reasonable standard of living. In addition, improved income security would facilitate the investigation of employer violations of workplace standards, as the cost of potential employer retaliation would be far less severe to a worker deciding whether or not to report problems at a place of employment before they reach the level of a severe injury or death which attracts outside attention.

Absent the implementation of a more thorough social safety net, the next best option would be to strengthen protections for Saskatchewan workers within a statutory framework no less comprehensive than the present one.

Among other options, this could include:

- a minimum wage set at a level sufficient to ensure that no full-time worker in Saskatchewan lives in poverty, and indexed to real costs of living (with some continued monitoring to ensure the level remains adequate);

- protections for workers based on the exercise of the rights listed in sections 4-8 of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code, in contrast to the current statutory protection which is limited to employer discrimination based on prohibited grounds;

- closing loopholes in the present legislation, including by reducing the list of employees excluded from the scope of the Labour Standards Act; and

- reinstating "card check" certification as a genuinely efficient and fair means of providing for representation in workplaces under circumstances where a certification vote is neither necessary nor efficient.

Unfortunately, many of the measures proposed in the Consultation Paper represent a step in precisely the wrong direction. Indeed, the focus on rewriting existing labour standards to accommodate practices which may currently be illegal sends a strong signal that the primary purpose of the consultation exercise is to further undermine workplace protections.

In particular, any excuse for employers to pay less than the general minimum wage based on age and disability will both devalue the work performed by the affected workers, and push down wages across multiple categories of workers. Likewise, an enforceable right to contractually require workers to work otherwise-prohibited overtime hours would substantially negate any work-life balance for precisely the workers who are most vulnerable. And a labour relations system which imposes disclosure requirements on unions which are not paralled among employers, which allows employers to refuse to submit union dues to a duly certified bargaining agent, or which allows an employer to choose the bargaining agent certified to speak for its workers as a matter of convenience, would plainly accomplish little other than to shift yet more workplace power into the hands of employers at the expense of Saskatchewan workers.

In closing, the development of a system of employment and labour legislation (with underlying social supports) should indeed be considered a work in progress. I trust that upon hearing from affected workers, this government will reverse its intentions to try to undermine the progress made to date.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Rick Salutin discusses the link between parity of wealth and democratic participation, while pointing out why there's reason for people to engage much more in the latter

(W)hy didn't the majority ever vote to expropriate the rich and take all their stuff? Perhaps it isn't that they were duped by media or agreed with the way things were. Maybe their ambitions were always modest: they didn't begrudge the 1 per cent what they had, so long as it left a decent life for them and their families.

Most people I know are fair-minded in that way. Perhaps, too, they'd rather not do unto others what's been done to them, reducing themselves morally in the process. When the recent eruptions began, it was only because the 1 per cent finally went too far. There's also the fact that in current circumstances a small narrowing of the income gap, a reintroduction of regulation and some concern for the environment may seem almost as utopian as a workers' revolution used to.

- Robyn Allan takes a closer look at Christy Clark's attempt to sell off British Columbia's natural habitat and coast:

There is a false narrative being advanced. Demands to share government revenues — which include income, sales, property, corporate and other taxes—from crude oil pipelines — in order to compensate for their inevitable environmental cost means the best we can hope for is a zero sum game. That doesn’t make any sense — its like saying you can punch me in the face as long as you pay for the dental work.

Clark’s setting herself up as the hard negotiator when there’s nothing to negotiate. British Columbians don’t want heavy crude oil piped through the province or shipped in oil tankers. It’s not a question of whether the economic benefit outweighs the environmental cost — that’s a false dichotomy. There is no economic benefit for B.C., and the study Clark points to — under scrutiny — comes out looking like nothing more than false promises.

- There's never been much doubt that the Cons have been perfectly happy to see public institutions burned to the ground. But I didn't think they'd ever advance that goal quite so literally.

- Finally, if Con cronies peddling insider access say we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about Con cronies peddling insider access, who are we to question?

[Edit: added link as per comments.]

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your weekend.

- Lana Payne criticizes two forms of cash hoarding: both the assets sitting idle in corporate coffers, and the money that's been funneled offshore by wealthy individuals:

By the end of each episode (of "Hoarders")...the audience finds out if the featured hoarders have been able to get their behaviour under control or if they have “fallen into the deep end of this painful disease.”
The difference between these hoarders and those we have been reading about in recent days in newspapers like The Guardian and The Globe and Mail is that one group acquires “a large number of possessions that others would consider useless,” and the other acquires possessions of value like cash and assets.

But both suffer from the inability to discard their hoarded possessions.

Take corporate Canada. Progressive economists have been complaining for some time about their cash and asset hoarding. Canada’s Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney, has also been critical of corporate Canada’s hoarding practices, saying there is no reason keeping Canadian companies from investing.

Certainly they have been given incentive enough to do so. But billions in corporate tax cuts have instead been stockpiled on top of their more than half a trillion dollars in cash reserves, rather than invested in the economy.

 - The Star-Phoenix editorial board worries that the Council of the Federation's attempts to encourage cooperation on health care will come to nothing if we can't count on a federal government to take on exactly the leadership role the Harper Cons have abandoned:

Although eight years ago Ottawa was setting conditions on its grants and even talking about a national pharmacare program, including a universal bulk-buying strategy to control costs, the Harper government is clear about its disinclination to be a big part of Canada's flagship social contract.

Without any federal leadership, Canadians can expect their health system, like the dream of a national energy strategy, to be sacrificed at the altar of narrow-minded provincial politics.

- Dr. Dawg highlights the absurdity of the RCMP labeling anybody who dares to express concern about an anti-environment government and its resource-sector puppeteers as a security threat.

- Finally, I don't expect the suggestion to get far for a multitude of reasons. But Ralph Surette's proposal that younger Liberals (including Justin Trudeau) ought to turn their individual efforts to building the NDP at least offers a more plausible means to unite the vast majority of Canadian progressives than formal merger plans which would inevitably result in years of wrangling among two separate party structures.

Sunday Morning 'Rider Blogging

Yes, yesterday's loss to Hamilton made for another painful result for a team which outplayed its opponent for most of the game. But as with the previous week's defeat against Calgary, there are a few lessons the Saskatchewan Roughriders should be able to take from the outcome.

To start with, the offence again looks to have changed from a model which worked early to one which failed late.

On the 'Riders' first drive, two short-yardage gambles paid off by giving the team its first touchdown of the game - and in both cases, the offensive line thoroughly controlled the line of scrimmage against Hamilton's defence. (Indeed, the team's one fourth-quarter short-yardage play was also a screaming success, with Kory Sheets picking up 8 yards on a 2nd-and-1.)

Yet the 'Riders didn't show any particular confidence in their short-yardage offence when it had a chance to keep the offence moving when it counted most. And punting may have been safer option in their own zone, the choice to pass on 2nd and 2 from Hamilton's 40 could well have made all the difference between a game-winning field goal and the 47-yarder which Chris Milo missed.

The passing game also showed both plenty of potential, and some room for improvement in the 'Riders' choice of strategies. The 'Riders flashed loads of receiving depth (with 7 different players catching Darian Durant passes for gains of 18 yards or more), but spent much of the game largely targeting two players. And it's probably worth asking whether Chris Getzlaf should still be one of the team's primary options: while he's always been an effective big-play threat, he's shown few signs of avoiding the drops which have always made him an uncertain proposition as a possession receiver.

On defence, the 'Riders' major strength early in the season again evaporated when it mattered most. In the first half, 'Rider defenders managed to at least pressure Henry Burris on occasion - and that was enough to keep the Ticats' offence from accomplishing much even without piling up sacks or turnovers.

But late in the game, Burris regularly had time to burn before finding receivers on slow-developing patterns all over the field. And whether that was the result of the prevent defence again proving counterproductive or a more general failure, it's surely a point the 'Riders will need to work on in a league where all but one or two starting quarterbacks will thoroughly punish a defence for easing off.

For now, the 'Riders are at least in better shape than anybody should have expected going into their bye week. But it's still an open question whether they'll learn from falling just short in the last two games - or whether a sense of late-game futility will be a problem as the season progresses.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- David Olive comments on the world food crisis, making the point that what we're lacking is some link between more-than-sufficient productive capacity and the nutritional needs of less wealthy people around the globe:

(A) permanently higher price for oil spurred successful innovation to reduce our reliance on petroleum products in realms outside of transportation and energy, along with a determined effort to find new sources of oil in increasingly remote places.

The global food crisis, by contrast, has not made us think differently about how we produce and use the fruit of the land. We have no national or global strategies for food-security or for nutrition. Speculators have not been reined in with limits on betting. And the powerful ethanol lobby hasn’t been shown the door, even though the production of ethanol consumes more energy than it returns as fuel.

And, conspicuously in the West, too much crop production goes into highly processed food drained of nutrients and fibre, accounting for a North American epidemic in obesity and diabetes.

- So naturally, your friendly neighbourhood wingnuts are focused on demolishing the few mechanisms left to ensure that mere workers have some say in the allocation of resources and the functioning of our economy.

- Michael Harris' latest column discusses how Canada's premiers are looking for the federal government to actually show some national leadership, rather than retreating as far as possible from the services most important to Canadians.

- Finally, Bruce Johnstone sees the proposed Nexen takeover as a litmus test in the application of the "net benefit" standard for foreign takeovers. And Erin Weir notes that whatever benefit Alberta may receive from a head-office promise, Saskatchewan looks to do nothing but lose out if the sale is approved.

Musical interlude

Delerium - Incantation