Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Daniel Wilson takes a look at how far too many in the media went along with the Harper Cons' hatchet job against First Nations:

(C)ompare the generalized outrage last week to the shrug elicited by the non-indigenous mayors around the country who have resigned after corruption allegations, are currently being investigated for fraud or sued for conflict of interest. 

By the standard applied to First Nations, the situations in Montreal, Laval, Mascouche, London, Toronto, Mississauga and Winnipeg are proof that all non-indigenous governments are corrupt and mismanaged and should have their funding cut off.  Such logic would suggest that Canadian citizens don’t deserve clean drinking water or schools for their kids since they are too lazy to insist on proper governance.

The unabashed complicity of the mainstream media in carrying out this hatchet job for the Harper government and unleashing a torrent of racism should be the subject of professional examination and deep personal shame for those involved.

- But then, Tobold Rollo points out that it's far from a first for the corporate press to be on the wrong side of history:

No one can know for sure just how long it takes for a journalist to “go soft”. The conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. once stood (sorry, wrote) courageously in opposition to the civil rights movement, reserving some of his most heroic denigrating prose for leaders such as Martin Luther King. Two decades later, Ronald Reagan would oppose the creation of Martin Luther King Day because of its economic impact only to sign it in the face of public pressure. But Buckley, still resilient, boldly pointed out the irony of creating a holiday in King’s name given the man’s laziness: “it rankles that we should be asked to take the day off to remember a man whose career was built on leisure.” Yet Buckley, too, would succumb. Fatigued by decades of demeaning the labours of the subjugated, Buckley finally gave in and pronounced his admiration for Martin Luther King. Truly heartbreaking.


If today’s writers have half the tenacity as our friend Buckley, we should see them exhibiting the first signs of quiet approval for Chief Theresa Spence and the Idle No More movement in about ten years. But for the time being we are a truly privileged audience, living in a time when the artful denigration of Indigenous peoples invites us to reflect on those heroes of the past who mocked the words and deeds of blacks, women, and homosexuals. These are truly amazing times.

 - Meanwhile, the #ottawapiskat hashtag has been offering the public an opportunity to judge the Harper Cons by the standards they've set for First Nations. Here are a few particular favourites.

- And needless to say, the comparison leads nicely to Jessica Bruno's report on how the Cons' use of public dollars can only be explained as a matter of partisan gain rather than reasonable public administration.

- Which looks rather consistent with the Cons' security apparatus - which is placing a higher priority on silencing left-wing voices who might dare to "bring attention to perceived policy failures" than dealing with neo-Nazi or white supremacist threats.

#skndpldr Roundup

With the holiday break now over, we can likely expect a steady stream of news from Saskatchewan's NDP leadership campaign until the March convention. So let's take a look at a few developments from the past week.

- While it's still not clear how much progress Cam Broten has made in generating excitement among the NDP's grassroots, he's certainly done well for himself when it comes to media reaction - with the latest example being Joe Couture's naming Broten as the top NDP performer in the legislature for 2012.

- Meanwhile, Yens Pedersen offered his own take on the campaign in the Star-Phoenix - drawing a contrast between Broten and Trent Wotherspoon as candidates he sees as pursuing power for its own sake, and Ryan Meili and Erin Weir as candidates more focused on policy outcomes. And while I'd see the issue as involving placement on a continuum rather than contrasting positions on a yes-or-no issue, there doesn't seem to be much doubt that the two sets of candidates better represent the business-as-usual and significant-reform positions respectively.

- Meili unveiled his policy on gender equality, with most of the more specific proposals summed up by this broad statement of principle:

There is no prescription to bring about greater equality; there is only a process. That process begins with changing the conversation about gender, recognizing that everyone benefits when the status of women improves. Rather than gender neutral (which tends to mean gender blind), policy decisions need to be made with an explicit gender lens and a commitment to gender equality in mind, from idea to implementation to evaluation.

- Finally, Gavin Gardiner and Brett Estey both offered partial coverage of yesterday's Rosetown leadership debate. But the more thorough review at the time from Cole Hogan seems to have disappeared.

Saturday Afternoon Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Lana Payne sounds the alarm about the choice of the government of Newfoundland and Labrador to cry "deficit!" as an excuse to slash social spending when the actual deficit is virtually identical to the amount it's spending on added resource development - and far less than what the province has handed to wealthy residents in tax cuts.

- Chantal Hebert rightly notes that Idle No More and the predictable bigoted backlash only serve as a single example of Canada's need to better address minorities:

Over the past few weeks, there are those who have been dismayed by the toxic tone of the social media as the First Nations issue has heated up. But the twittersphere is only providing a more public outlet for a visceral and polarizing current that systematically surfaces in tandem with any discussion of the place of the country’s national minorities in modern-day Canada.

It was just easier to diminish the existence of that current back when it was not in plain sight.

Does not anyone remember the quasi-hysterical reaction and the over-the-top language that attended the adoption of a mere House of Commons resolution dealing with Quebec’s national status in 2006 in some otherwise mainstream quarters?

Or what about the vitriolic comments that so routinely make their way below media stories related to Quebec these days that many no longer take notice of them?

There are many admirable features to Canada’s attachment to a civic form of nationalism but the tendency to use it to refuse to come to terms with the distinctive elements that are at the root of the country’s identity is not one of them.

- Meanwhile, Lloyd Axworthy and Wab Kinew write about the need to respond to Idle No More with real change in how Canada addresses First Nations:

As the Idle No More movement marches its way into our national consciousness, it has become too easy to forget that this country began with co-operation between indigenous and European peoples. The responses have divided many, making supporters of some “average Canadians” and drawing vehement and, occasionally, vitriolic opposition from others.

While discussion always strengthens democracy, we ought not to get too caught up in the bickering to ignore the broader opportunity that Idle No More offers us: the chance to engage in nation-building, to make the country we love stronger. Canada’s future is strongly tied to the well-being of its indigenous peoples.
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Some Canadians may fear that they’ll be worse off or face a higher tax burden if indigenous people do better. But the nation’s well-being is not a zero-sum game. Right now, there are thousands of young indigenous people who face much longer odds on the road to success than the average child. If we help them better fulfill their potential, they’ll eventually contribute more to our society. As the first peoples do better, we’ll all do better.

There’s a strong moral argument in favour of doing right by this country’s first peoples as well. Idle No More has garnered international attention, in the form of solidarity protests and also from some serious media outlets. Do Canadians really want to stand in front of the world opposed to equal and equitable opportunities for first nations, Inuit and Métis children? Do we really want to say we’re a country that dishonours its treaty commitments? We think not.

- Finally, Lee Berthiaume reports that the Cons are backtracking on their previous plans to send disaster areas a bill for calling in the Canadian Forces. Which certainly beats the alternative - but nonetheless serves as rather stark evidence as to how they'd like to govern if they could get away with it.

#skndpldr Candidate Update - Trent Wotherspoon

Let's close my mid-campaign updates with a look at Trent Wotherspoon - who started the campaign trying to lock in an image to swing the race in his favour, but looks instead to have generated the widest range of possible outcomes as the campaign kicks into high gear.

Wotherspoon's campaign launch remains the largest display of support any candidate has been able to show off. But the impressive turnout from his announcement has given way to what looks to be a mid-range campaign in most areas: Wotherspoon's organization has generated modest totals in online support and involvement, mid-to-upper-end fund-raising matched with large expenditures, and a list of endorsers that doesn't particularly stand out compared to those of Ryan Meili or Cam Broten.

But if Wotherspoon is far from being a prohibitive favourite as his campaign tried to project, he's still in the thick of the race - as the combination of a genial candidate and a generally effective campaign team gives him a solid starting point for the second half of the campaign.

That is, as long as Wotherspoon is able to answer the one question that's followed him throughout the leadership race: will he be able to back up his positive image with enough command of policy issues to serve as the face of the Saskatchewan NDP and its policies?

So far, the debates have presented him surprisingly little need to address that issue: Wotherspoon has chosen to be almost entirely non-adversarial in asking questions of his competitors, and they've largely responded in kind. Which means that Wotherspoon hasn't yet had to explain any organizing set of principles or theoretical basis behind his interesting but occasionally-disjointed set of policy proposals. 

I doubt Wotherspoon's competitors will let him ease his way through the second set of debates the way they did early in the campaign. But even if he can skate away from larger issues for the moment, Wotherspoon will ultimately face tough questions from the NDP's political opponents and the media if elected leader. And the current campaign offers the ideal time for him to both work on providing answers that go beyond his scripted talking points, and put those skills to the test (both in the party's debates and in dealing with the media).

If Wotherspoon succeeds on that front (which I see as entirely possible), then he figures to be in as good a position as anybody to win over support as the leadership campaign progresses. But he'll have to choose whether to make the effort, or to take a seemingly safer path in the leadership race which may pose far greater risks in the long term.

#skndpldr Candidate Update - Erin Weir

As the candidate with the least name recognition in a field consisting of the 2009 Saskatchewan NDP leadership runner-up and two multi-term MLAs, Erin Weir has spent much of the ongoing leadership campaign working on being seen as a contender within the field, rather than being ignored an also-ran. And the most important publicly-available indicators (including his own campaign's much-ballyhooed poll, as well as the candidate fund-raising numbers) suggest he's met that standard so far.

In addition, Weir has excelled in the give-and-take portions of the leadership debates, sparring regularly with each of the other candidates and generally getting the better of the exchanges.

But to succeed in the leadership campaign, Weir will ultimately need to win over enough undecided voters and/or down-ballot support to build off of that initial position. And there's reason to wonder whether his early strategy and positioning may limit his growth potential as the campaign progresses.

In particular, Weir has focused most of his attention on policy costing and details - essentially taking agreement on progressive values as a given among the pool of possible voters, and choosing not to make much of a principled case for them himself.

In the longer term, that looks to me like a missed opportunity to build support for agreed values using the platform offered by coverage of the leadership race. But it also means that undecided voters comparing how candidates' messages reflect their own values priorities may end up finding less in Weir's presentation than in that of the other candidates.

At the same time, Weir's campaign has focused to a great extent on responding to economic news in the media - where he typically answers the compulsive self-promotion of the Saskatchewan Party (or in some cases the federal Conservatives) with what can seem to be an equally reflexive countermessage. That strategy certainly keeps his name in the public eye as a critic of the Wall government, but it too means that he's regularly seen responding to others' actions and messages, rather than building a leadership organization that can provide a model for the NDP's future growth.

To sum up, Weir's campaign has taken a relatively safe path toward being seen as a contender - but only at the cost of some significant limitations on his ability to emerge at the head of the pack. And it's an open question whether Weir's current messages have much chance of winning over additional members, or whether he'll have to change course significantly to reach out beyond his immediate pool of support.

Musical interlude

Love and Rockets - Sweet Lover Hangover

#skndpldr Candidate Update - Ryan Meili

When Saskatchewan's NDP leadership race started, one of the most important questions for all of the candidates was the level of organization Ryan Meili would bring to the campaign: whether he'd build significantly from what had been a growing base by the end of the 2009 race, or largely start his campaign from scratch. And he got a late enough start on the policy front in particular to leave that question in doubt for at least a few weeks.

By now, though, Meili's answer looks to have been fairly definitive. His rank on visible indicators of support ranges from a slight lead in fund-raising to huge advantages in Facebook and Twitter followers. And those numbers are matched by a greater range of ongoing grassroots activity in his campaign than any other - with the latest twist being the twibeard as a highly visible symbol of support (coupled with the most visible membership drive of any of the contenders).

Meanwhile, Meili has also matured as a candidate since 2009 - combining generally effective general speeches with both clear explanations for his own policies, and thoughtful responses to questions that don't form part of his platform.

That combination of organization and candidate strength would seem to position Meili as the favourite going into the home stretch of the campaign. But it may also change Meili's challenge in the months to come.

While Meili has been in Cam Broten's cross-hairs in particular since the debates started last fall, he now figures to be a primary target for each of the other campaigns. And the more his competitors see a need to undercut Meili's position by offering reasons to vote against him, the tougher it may be for him to win down-ballot support to match a strong first-ballot showing.

Of course, the combination of a likeable candidate and active grassroots support can go a long way toward turning that balance in Meili's favour. But the one test Meili hasn't yet had to address is that of how to handle being at the front of the pack - and that looks to be his task over the next couple of months.

On party time

Not surprisingly, I have some reservations about Kai Nagata's view that the federal Lib leadership campaign has much to offer toward the development of progressive politics in Canada. But I'll give Nagata credit for this much: he's absolutely right to make the point that we should treat active and public involvement within party structures as a positive step, not a disqualifying factor for anybody wanting to be able to speak to broader issues.

Which makes this look like one of the more interesting developments in Saskatchewan's NDP leadership campaign so far. While all of the candidates are seeking to encourage supporters to join in one form or another, Aaron Genest has set up a group dedicated to promoting membership as an end in itself rather than a means of supporting a particular leadership candidate, with the promise of at least one event to get the word out in advance of the January 25 deadline.

Naturally, the first wave of group members is made up largely of familiar faces within the NDP. But I'll be highly curious to see how far the group can extend beyond that circle. And it could be that a message of general inclusion rather than candidate positioning could make an important difference in the future of both the leadership campaign, and the building of the party.

#skndpldr Candidate Update - Cam Broten

We're now approaching the home stretch of Saskatchewan's NDP leadership race - with the membership deadline looming in just over two weeks, and under two months left until the vote itself. But while there will be plenty of news to cover in that time, let's take a look back at how each candidate's campaign has progressed so far - starting with Cam Broten.

At the start, I noted that Broten's most likely path to victory was as an everybody's-second-choice type of candidate. And his campaign thus far has largely followed that strategy.

On the bright side for Broten, he's been a consistently competent performer in the leadership debates, combining effective statements of values and messages about inclusion and unity with strong responses when he's been challenged on particular issues. And he's certainly made efforts to rise above the leadership race itself to speak to shared party interests.

Meanwhile, within the campaign itself Broten has managed to generate at least some flow of activity alongside the debate schedule, with particular emphasis on a slightly wider range of endorsements than would have anticipated. And as a wild card for the balance of the campaign, Broten had more cash on hand than his opponents at last notice.

That said, it's fairly striking that Broten's strengths have developed in the absence of much obvious activity out of his campaign aside from rolling out endorsements.

Broten's edge in cash on hand as of the end of November was based on his having spent less than Ryan Meili and Trent Wotherspoon. But his third-place ranking in fund-raising (with a total substantially closer to Erin Weir in fourth than the candidates ahead of him) leaves room for question as to how much grassroots enthusiasm his campaign is actually generating, particularly in light of his moderate-at-best rankings in other publicly-available metrics such as Facebook and Twitter supporters and activity.

Now, one can make the case that a second-choice campaign might have some strategic incentives to hide its true strength so as to avoid attracting too much negative attention. But I have trouble seeing it as a plus for a campaign if its best-case scenario involves laying low and concealing support rather than building momentum this close to the membership and voting deadlines. And if Broten isn't able to make some strides at the grassroots level over the next month, there's reason to wonder whether any amount of down-ballot support will matter.

New column day

Here, on the Cons' choice to start charging emergency-stricken communities for disaster relief work by the Canadian Forces.

For further reading, see the initial report from Lee Berthiaume, as well as Michael Den Tandt's criticism of the move.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Karl Flecker discusses how the Cons' push to encourage employers to use temporary foreign workers will affect wages for everybody:

In fact, what Kenney said was untrue. He has conveniently forgotten that his government significantly changed the wage rules for employers hiring high-skilled migrant workers. On April 25, 2012, after direct consultations with a select group of employers, Diane Finley, Minister of Human Resources Skills Development Canada, announced a new "Accelerated Labour Market Opinion" to provide employers with "greater flexibility." "Wages," she said, "that are up to 15 per cent below the average wage for an occupation in a specific region will now be accepted."

Later in May, her department issued a backgrounder clarifying that employers would also be able to pay low-skilled migrant workers five per cent less than prevailing wage rates, and that the Accelerated Labour Market Opinion process "may gradually be expanded to include risk-based processing for all occupations and components of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program." Simply put, this means the Conservative government plans to implement a pay-less wage structure across all streams of the program. Given that migrant workers are now present in every sector of the economy, this change will create the means to lower wages for all workers.

Minister Kenney's public assurance that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program requires employers to pay at or above the prevailing wage rate of any occupation does not hold water.

- Meanwhile, James Keller reports that the Cons are now "vigorously defending" the use of "temporary" foreign workers for upwards of a decade - even in the case of HD Mining where Diane Finley had to admit to problems with the use of that type of labour.

- Both Chris Selley and Bruce Anderson make the point that the Cons' refusal to consult or listen to anybody when it came to their omnibus budget monstrosities has only made it impossible for them to feign any willingness to work constructively with First Nations.

- Finally, Scott Sinclair writes about the possible effect of CETA on fisheries regulation. But without diminishing the importance of our fisheries, the most significant takeaway is that every other sphere of government action figures to be similarly affected.

Deep thought

I for one proudly stand in favour of preventing bad things from happening. And I'd think it's worth being rather concerned that our federal government and its corporate puppetmasters disagree.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Daniel Wilson discusses how Stephen Harper's antipathy toward First Nations is making a failure of his time in office:

On the global stage, he stood almost alone in opposition to 144 other countries in voting against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Domestically, he has tabled bills that diminish First Nations jurisdiction to that of administrative agencies of the federal government.  His party has consistently claimed that First Nation governments are corrupt or mismanaged.  He killed the Kelowna Accord. His steadfast refusal to fund First Nation child welfare agencies at the same rate as provincial agencies -- a gap of 22 per cent according to the Auditor General -- is the subject of a human rights complaint for discrimination. The cap of two per cent funding growth per annum for education, housing, infrastructure (like drinking water) and other essential services means that, while keeping up with inflation, First Nations are further impoverished each year at the same rate as they have children (approximately 3.5 per year).  To make his purpose obvious, he has legislation aimed at selling communally held reserve lands to private interests and the now infamous Bill C-45 created new arrangements for the leasing of reserve lands to non-band members.

Each of these steps is aimed at diminishing the power and capacity of First Nations to function.  Each is calculated to drive people off reserve. Like Harper's legislative attacks on environmental protection, each serves the goal of eventually allowing oil, gas, mining, and other resource extraction industries to go about their business unhindered.

But people stood up to the bully and in his first real test, he blinked. In reluctantly agreeing to meet this Friday, he has shown his nervousness. In the maliciousness with which his people have attacked Chief Theresa Spence this week, he has shown his fear.

- Meanwhile, Thomas Walkom discusses the real story behind Attawapiskat's dire straits - as much-ballyhooed resource development has done nothing to improve the lot of the community. Heather Mallick writes about the importance of First Nations activists standing up for themselves. And Pat Atkinson laments the Harper Cons' utter failure to consult First Nations.

- Ian Austen reports on a new study showing that the harmful by-products of tar sands exploitation are spreading much further than previously known.

- And finally, Jim Guy is the latest to question the Cons' choice to single out organized labour for punishment and the eradication of member privacy.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Wintry cats.

#skndpldr Roundup

With the holiday break coming to an end, let's take a quick look at what's new in the Saskatchewan NDP leadership campaign before taking stock as to where the candidates stand.

While the official debates resume this weekend, the most important date to watch for is the January 25 membership deadline. Ryan Meili and Trent Wotherspoon have both put together targeted efforts to recruit new voters through their own campaigns, but eligible voters interested in joining can also do so through the NDP's provincial office.

The break has seen plenty of talk about endorsements - with Jason Hammond and Scott Stelmaschuk both discussing the role they see endorsements playing within the campaign. Beyond my earlier comments, I'll add only that I see less of a distinction than Scott between "name dropping" endorsements and other types: as much as members may respect senior figures within the party, I wouldn't necessarily see the support of a past MLA carrying much more weight than that of any other endorser with a relatively similar inclination and ability to reach out to voters. And the most important effect of public endorsements may be to encourage a wider range of people to actually make the effort.

Meanwhile, Wotherspoon added to his broad base of support by earning some Manitoba cabinet endorsements. And Cam Broten has continued to add past Saskatchewan candidates and cabinet members to his list of endorsers - though it's beginning to look rather striking that his campaign's news has consisted of nothing but endorsements since mid-October.

Finally on the policy side, Ryan Meili unveiled two more platform planks: a housing strategy that includes ending homelessness in Saskatchewan within ten years, and a sexual and reproductive health plan to improve equitable access to reproductive health services.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Michael Harris discusses the impending moment of truth for the Cons in owning up to their substantive failures toward Canada's First Nations:

Whether it’s Canada’s natives or its health ministers, Stephen Harper’s preferred place for his opponents is under his thumb. He has replaced the alternating current of democracy with the direct current of oligarchy. Ordinary people remain as invisible to him now as they have been since 2006.

For that reason, Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike has been a disaster for the man who doesn’t like to negotiate, let alone negotiate with a nobody, especially a nobody who has managed to put him under the gun. Remember, this is a guy who wouldn’t even talk to Canada’s premiers. Now they know the drill: stop eating.
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What aboriginals need is for treaties to be honoured on something other than the long hours of the geological clock. What they need is legislative protection for their lands and equal say in the laws that govern them as guaranteed by the Constitution. But what they have gotten from Stephen Harper since his “official” apology to Aboriginal Peoples in 2008 has not quite lived up to the billing of a “renewed” relationship.

The Harper government has unilaterally changed the Indian Act. It has unilaterally changed environmental legislation that weakens protection of fresh water and endangered fish species. It has made it easier for major developments to take place with less study of the environmental impact and no equal say for aboriginals. And in 2012, the very year Stephen Harper pledged to renew the search for justice for all native peoples, his “little minister” — as Chief Spence described John Duncan — announced sweeping cuts for core aboriginal organizations across Canada.

One hundred expert academics signed a damning letter to Duncan last November decrying the loss of funding for native communities in the area of health, clean drinking water, education and infrastructure. “The potential loss of expertise is staggering, and could take a generation to recover from,” the researchers warned.

- Frank Graves rightly notes that social media hasn't yet had as strong an impact on our political scene as some might have expected. But I'll note that it's still an open question whether it will eventually fulfill its potential - especially when it's possible to look to the U.S. for obvious examples of success in reaching new voter groups.

- Donald Savoie writes that the decades-old fad of trying to run government like a business has proven unsuccessful:

Public servants of yesteryear would emphasize proper data-gathering procedures and produce analyses with predictive power. Politicians grabbed the policy-making levers and decided to turn bureaucrats into better managers. Public servants were not about to admit that their management skills were lacking, so politicians looked to the private sector for inspiration. As a result, strategic plans were turned into business plans, citizens into customers and cabinet into a powerless board of directors, and attempts were made to tie pay to performance.

The notion that public administration could be made to look like private-sector management has been ill-conceived, misguided and costly to taxpayers. Management in the private sector has everything to do with the bottom line and market share. Administration in the public sector is a matter of opinion, debate and blame avoidance in a politically charged environment. It doesn’t much matter in the private sector if you get it wrong 40 per cent of the time so long as you turn a handsome profit and increase market share. It doesn’t much matter in the public sector if you get it right 99 per cent of the time if the 1 per cent you get wrong becomes a heated issue in Question Period and the media.
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Public servants now produce all manner of reports and navigate various accountability requirements to fabricate a bottom line. The result: Ottawa has an oversupply of officers of Parliament, accountability and oversight processes and performance and evaluation reports. Hundreds of reports are carted every year to Parliament, where they remain unread unless one of them has information to embarrass the government.

The business vocabulary in government has, if nothing more, empowered managers to grow government operations by stealth. The Chrétien-Martin review (1994-98) eliminated 45,000 positions, but by the time Stephen Harper launched his own review in 2011, the government had added more than 70,000 positions. Thousands of new oversight positions have been created in Ottawa to manage accountability processes. Thirty years ago, 70 per cent of federal public servants were located in the regions; today, the number is 57 per cent. Without putting too fine a point on it, public servants in the field deliver public services, while those in Ottawa provide policy advice and manage processes and oversight requirements.

- But if there's one lesson we should hope to take from a business mindset, it's that we shouldn't leave obvious sources of revenue on the table - and plenty of voters look to have bought into that view.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Frank Graves' review of the current state of Canadian politics focuses in on the growing gap between the Cons' waning interest in listening to the public, and their growing expenditures on advertising and marketing:

In Canada in 2006, the federal government spent roughly the same amount of money on polling as it did on advertising (I declare a major self-interest on this point). Polling for the federal government is non-partisan and designed to solicit the feedback of citizens and clients for government on programs and policies. Government advertising is also supposed to be non-partisan and is intended to explain or communicate.

Cynics suggest that advertising is now more partisan in nature and is designed to persuade and comfort the public. Note, for example, the continuing federal marketing effort on Canada’s Economic Action Plan, which actually concluded its stimulus phase a couple of years ago. Although the numbers are difficult to nail down, it is clear that the federal government now spends somewhere between ten and twenty times as much on advertising as it does on ‘listening to Canadians’.

This dramatic shift from parity of polling and advertising is a fairly minor example of the shift from a focus on policy and engagement to one on persuasion and branding. Policy research has dropped dramatically in the Government of Canada, as Alan Gregg (sic) and others have noted.

This is not unique to Canada and the shift from the pursuit of rational public policies to massive investments in political marketing intended to cajole and persuade is our final example of a force we can expect to see bending Canadian politics for the foreseeable future.

- Meanwhile, Charlie Smith suggests that corporate self-regulation has been a failure when it comes to advertising standards - and wonders whether the NDP will call for public regulation instead.

- Keith Reynolds points out the inevitable intersection of two major corporatist trends: as the same time that P3s are pitched as a possible source of corporate tax revenue, tax avoidance schemes serve to make sure that the least possible amount of P3s spending actually stays within a province:

Partnerships BC calculates how much the private sector will pay in taxes. It calculates all of the expected tax revenue for BC and half of the expected tax revenue for the federal government. This amount is then added to the predicted cost of doing the project publicly because it is considered revenue lost to the province from taxes. The total predicted cost is then compared to the total predicted cost of doing a P3.

But what happens if the tax revenue predicted from the P3 project doesn’t materialize? That means the province does not get the expected revenue, which is a big deal in cash strapped British Columbia. It also means that the comparison used to decide whether to use a P3 to do the project publicly was biased against public operation because of overly optimistic revenue expectations from the P3.

One of the ways companies cut their taxes is by moving their headquarters to tax havens.  Instead of claiming their profits in the country where they actually deliver services profits are claimed in the tax haven and taxes are paid at much lower rates.

- Finally, the NDP's list of Harper Con lowlights offers a useful reminder as to just how far Canada has sunk over the past year.

On ranges of options

There are surely worse offenders to point out in the bevy of recaps and previews we inevitably see at year's end. But I'll pick on Paul Wells' latest as an example of a well-regarded observer making obvious missteps in trying to limit the scope of possibilities we should consider:

The opposition parties should all worry, all the time, that their support is simply a system of communicating vases: that rising Green support hurts mostly New Democrat and Liberal incumbents, that Trudeau or Marc Garneau or Martha Hall Findlay can hope at best only to replace Mulcair as Stephen Harper’s sixth opposition leader. A party normally loses power only when its supporters stop supporting it. In 2008 and 2011 no opposition party could dissuade large numbers of Conservative voters from voting Conservative again, because the kind of people who were amenable to voting Conservative could not be dissuaded from their belief that Harper would be a better economic manager than the alternatives.

There are only three paths to power for any opposition leader: peel away a large amount of what has been, for four elections in a row, solid Conservative support; completely collapse voter support for the other opposition parties; or implement a workable plan for opposition-party merger or cooperation. None of these can be done in the five weeks before an election. The work on any of these plans would need to start soon. If 2013 is a year in which little changes in the distribution of political power and partisan support, it will be a very good year for Stephen Harper.

Now, I certainly don't disagree with the broader point that 2013 will likely be a crucial year in laying the groundwork for the next federal election (whenever it occurs). But let's take a step back and look at Wells' assumptions as to how a change in government might come about.

To start with, I'm at a loss as to how peeling off "what has been, for four elections in a row, solid Conservative support" could be considered a less daunting task than making efforts to make connections within the similarly-sized pool of previous non-voters.

Of course, it might seem like a reasonable default setting to assume that previous demographic information will remain applicable for future elections as well. But I'd invite Wells to ask President Romney whether the assumption of constant participation and turnout levels is necessarily a safe one.

Indeed, it may well be that the most important work for any political party is to see and organize potential groups of supporters which others lack the foresight to consider as realistic targets. And the two most obvious shifts in the last few Canadian federal election cycles have been based on exactly those types of efforts: the Cons' pursuit of immigrant communities, and the NDP's emergence in Quebec.

At best, one can try to take the cynical view that non-voters are singularly unworthy of any effort based on their failure to participate in the past. But that still reflects a matter of argument rather than bright-line definition of options - and I for one would consider it a severe disappointment if the NDP ends its well-established (and thus-far effective) work in reaching out to new voters.

Beyond that, there's also the possibility that splits among the current opposition parties might prove more favourable if they take different shapes over the next few years than in previous election cycles - resulting in a change in Parliament's power dynamics without a single party following Wells' proposed paths to power.

In particular, the much-discussed shift to the rhetorical right among the Libs' leadership candidates could well set up a split in Wells' proposed paths. It may be that the group of past Con supporters most likely to change allegiances would consist of centre-to-right voters who might be most easily shaken off by a Lib focus on some combination of market values and ethical concerns. But the most likely result of that shift could be an NDP government at the party's current level of support, as the strategy which maximizes the Libs' growth potential among Con voters might help consolidate the NDP's hold on the left.

Similarly, there are any number of possible groups of Con voters who might be peeled off in ways that don't necessarily reflect the model of a single opposition party carrying out a single action as the basis for taking power - but which might give rise to different voting dynamics which would result in a change in government.
 
Now, I won't presume to say that any one strategy is bound to succeed or fail. And there would surely be some problems in trying to rely on any of the above suggestions as the sole hope for taking down the Harper Cons.

But none of Wells' three proposed paths is particularly safe or easy either - meaning that there's little valid basis for drawing a line between those worth considering and those to be discarded. And as a matter of general principle, the most dangerous choice the opposition parties can make at this stage is to arbitrarily rule out options which might produce better results.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Crawford Kilian comments on Chrystia Freeland's Plutocrats as a useful expression of trends many of us have seen in action for some time:

(T)he plutonomy is not just booming, but skewing the still-depressed economy the rest of us live in. Many of the plutocrats reflect soberly on Andrew Carnegie's comment that the man who dies rich dies disgraced. Many, including George Soros, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett, are giving away their billions to various causes and charities.

Individually, those causes may be admirable (Soros has worked hard to promote democracy in eastern Europe). Collectively, those causes may be compromised and diverted from their original purposes by the sheer quantity of plutocratic money available. And of course many billionaires like the Koch brothers are pumping money into political causes that promise to keep their taxes low while suffocating government programs for the rest of us.

This is just one form of plutocratic "rent-seeking" -- getting one's businesses into a monopoly position, or lowering their operational costs, through favourable legislation. Every business, after all, wants to improve its own working conditions, just as every worker does.

But what is good for one's business is not always good for the country. Rent-seeking simply runs up the plutocrats' revenues while doing nothing for their customers. And it never occurs to such plutocrats that their success ultimately stems from the system created and maintained by the rest of society. As Barack Obama observed, "You didn't build that."

Freeland makes a useful contrast between plutocrats who are pro-market and those who are pro-business: In the market, companies compete, innovate, or die if they can't. This is the "creative destruction" that brings genuine improvements in living standards, and it's still at work. As one plutocrat told Freeland, the big companies used to eat the little ones. Now the swift eat the slow.
But in business, one tries to protect one's own company by eliminating the competition (and the innovation). Historically, innovators become consolidators and rent-seekers, creating a new privileged class of their children and hangers-on.

- And on a related note, Frances Russell writes that we're now in the age of corporate shakedowns of government:

A Canadian government official puts it this way: “I’ve seen the letters from the New York and D.C. law firms coming up to the Canadian government on virtually every new environmental regulation … Virtually all of the new initiatives were targeted and most of them never saw the light of day.”

These so-called “pre-emptive strikes” are on the rise, with investment arbitration no longer a last resort but a political weapon in a wider war of attrition against states.

Even already-adopted laws on public health and environmental protection have been abandoned or watered down because of the threat of huge damage claims. Canada backed away from anti-smoking policies after Big Tobacco threatened to seek compensation.

NAFTA and its growing ranks of copycats like the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership are about nothing less than entrenching de facto government by transnational corporations. So far, the corporations are winning. In the process, they’re not just enriching themselves but also a global network of fabulously wealthy lawyers and accountants busy impoverishing governments and their citizens to achieve maximum profits for the multinationals they represent.

- Frank Graves discusses how arguably rational political calculations on the part of the Cons may be producing decisions which directly attack Canada's future:

The political calculus couldn’t be clearer: it makes great sense for a conservative politician to concentrate on emotionally resonant policies and communications which will appeal to a group that votes en masse. It also makes sense to discourage the participation of younger voters (who wouldn’t vote for you anyway) through negative advertising and policy positions that are of little interest, or antagonistic, to those younger voters.

The net result, however, is a gerontocracy which reflects the exaggerated and imagined fears of older Canada precisely at a time when we urgently need the more optimistic and innovative outlook of the relatively scarcer youth portion of our society. So good politics becomes highly suspect as a tool for meeting the severe challenges of the 21st century.

This growing disconnect between the public interest and what works in the political marketplace is a serious challenge. The mounting generational tensions in our society are just one particularly unwelcome expression of this.

- Trish Hennessy runs the numbers on how First Nations have been frozen out of social gains in Canada.

- Finally, Andrew Potter expands on Glen McGregor's ideas for more productive political journalism:

If there is a big takeaway from "McDogme95" (as Stephen Maher calls it) it is this: It is an opportunity for political journalists to retrench and concentrate their energies on what they are best positioned and best qualified to do: work sources, file ATIP requests, comb through public databases, and break stories that are in the public interest. That in turn creates a space for academics to insert themselves directly into the conversation through their own devices (Twitter, blogs, etc), or through more traditional means such as op-eds or essays. (I can't think of a better example of this than Peter Loewen's recent essay for the Citizen looking at what Stephen Harper is up to.)

Canadian politics is in need of both better reporting and better contributions by academics. Glen McGregor's manifesto is an excellent first step at articulating the proper division of labour that will take us in that direction.

Musical interlude

Serge Devant & Danny Inzerillo feat. Polina - When You Came Along

On open invitations

Jon Worth's post on the distinction between partisan politics (as generally understood) and movement-based activism is well worth a read, particularly in pointing out how the latter may better express what people actually want to see out of politics:

Since first reading Mary Kaldor’s piece at the LSE EUROPP blog this autumn about alternative social movements I’ve been fascinated by the practical meaning of the term “prefigurative action” that she mentions. Her description of the term is “the attempt to practice the kind of democracy that the participants imagine” – i.e. to behave in politics in the way that we behave in our normal lives. This, I think, is absolutely central to the problems our traditional party structures face, and it remains the reason people are inspired by Occupy, even if the practical outcomes Occupy can bring are so thin.

Take, for example, the new craze within the Labour Party in the UK to brand everything “One Nation”, started by Ed Miliband in his conference speech in October. I am a member of the party, but I have no idea how the mantra came into being. But now everyone follows it, shadow cabinet members and think tank wonks repeat it, and it has become party line. That process is not normal, it is not healthy. It is not practicing the kind of politics the participants imagine. Try changing the mission statement of a large corporation so abruptly and there would be harsh counter-reactions among the employees. In Labour there is slavish, flaccid loyalty among the devotees (at least in public), and a shrug from the 99.5% of the UK population that are not party members.

The problem is that being in a party for a decade squeezes the life, the straightforward honesty, the originality out of people. It is not that party people become dishonest per se, but more that the spontaneity, the vitality is drained from them. They will Google themselves compulsively to check how they are being perceived, rather that using the net to really make political change happen. They will use social networks to repeat the leadership’s line and show how diligent they are on #LabourDoorstep, rather than building networks beyond the party. Party politics is no “ecosystem fizzing with ideas”, the words Alex uses to describe the social innovation sector in the UK.

The problem is that the old ways still can win elections in the UK. Labour and the Tories can muster up enough activists in the 2015 election, and the first past the post election system will, as ever, mask that a third of the votes will be for non-mainstream parties, while 2/5 of the population will not vote at all. And in the meantime the media will frame all of this as a victory for some party or another, and yet our political system and the quality of our politics will be poorer as a result.

But I do take issue with the implicit conclusion that even a fully distorted, first-past-the-post system doesn't leave room for a party to bridge the gap between the need to promote its own agenda, and the need to work with others who don't fully agree.

Let's not forget that it was less than two years ago that Canada's Prime Minister built his campaign message around an all-out assault on the very idea of cooperation and coalition-building. And the result wasn't to destroy the lone party which actually spoke up for those virtues, but to push it to a record showing which nearly toppled an unsuspecting governing party.

Which means that if too many politicians are earning themselves repeated lectures on the importance of working across party lines and listening to the wide range of actors affected by policy decisions, it reflects a lack of memory of recent events as well as more distant ones. While we may not have as many examples as we'd like, the available evidence suggests that Canadian voters will reward rather than punishing a party reaches beyond its own loyalists in the pursuit of shared values.

And that's merely within the existing voter pool. But as Worth notes, in the UK as elsewhere there's an increasingly large share of the population tuning out politics altogether as it becomes based more on brand competition than a sense of popular input and involvement. And if there's indeed some connection between those two factors, then it stands to reason that an "ecosystem fizzing with ideas" model might also be able to move the needle as a matter of crass partisan consideration by expanding the group of possible voters (an option I'll discuss in more detail in a post to come).

All of which is to say that there looks to be plenty of opportunity for parties to break out of the march-in-lockstep model - and that they may well benefit just as much as the broader political system for the effort.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Barbara Yaffe lets Hugh Segal make the case for a guaranteed annual income to end poverty in Canada:

(Hugh Segal) says it could be arranged by way of a tax credit through the income tax system, to top up income of anyone falling below Statistics Canada’s Low Income Cutoff (LICO).

LICO for a single person is about $22,200; for a family with three children, roughly $47,000.

“In other words,” writes Segal, “being poor would become a problem we all buffered in the same way as we buffer all Canadians relative to health care.”

He estimates the annual cost at about $10,000 per person.

But when all the billions now spent on health care and heavily stigmatized welfare payments — to alternatively address needs of the poor — are subtracted, the net cost to government would be zero.

“The cost to our Canadian economy of poor Canadians dropping out of school, getting sick faster, staying in hospital longer and living shorter lives than the rest of us is in the billions.”
...
Cost savings to governments would indeed be real, according to a study cited by Segal, carried out by University of Manitoba health sciences professor Evelyn Forget.

Forget tracked an 8.5-per-cent drop in hospital visits among a sample group of farm families in Dauphin, Man., who were part of a 1970s-era federal experiment guaranteeing minimum incomes in case of crop failures.

That experiment also rendered invalid a notion that guaranteed incomes prompt recipients to quit work to become couch potatoes.

“The efficient and humane thing to do is to take the example of Dauphin and learn from it,” writes Segal, noting Ottawa wouldn’t need a new bureaucracy to deliver guaranteed incomes.

“We have the (tax) system in place.”

 - Meanwhile, Alex Himelfarb proposes that we measure our actions as a society by how we treat those who have the least:

International agencies and a number of countries are developing indices that take into account equality, sustainability, democracy and trust, as well as economic performance. In Canada, Roy Romanow has proposed just such an index, and recently David Suzuki added his voice to the campaign to think beyond GDP — promoting a measure of General National Happiness with a central place for the health of the environment, which enables all else. These are welcome initiatives because they ask us to consider what is important, what our future ought to look like.

To this work I would propose the addition of another measure, which despite its long pedigree is too easily overlooked. Gandhi and Pope John Paul II, Aristotle and John Rawls, and artists through the ages have all reminded us that the real test of any society is how we treat the weakest among us. Here too, with glaring exceptions, none more shameful than our relationship with aboriginal peoples, we have done pretty well. For example, we have historically been above average on measures of equality, well ahead of the U.S. We were seen as proof that diversity and equality could coexist, that empathy and sharing could bridge differences in language, culture, lifestyle. We came to see immigration as a solution, not a problem, and to be open to refugees.

Even in our relationship with aboriginal peoples, this government’s historic apology for some of the most grievous wrongs could have been a signal of a new, more respectful relationship (especially needed after the abandonment of the Kelowna Accord).
...
When governing is all short-term economic growth, then aboriginal rights and environmental protections become inconveniences to be ignored or managed. Refugees, the unemployed and the poor come to be seen and treated as freeloaders, a drag on the economy, rather than fellow citizens, often victims of an increasingly mean version of capitalism. And criminals are turned into convenient scapegoats for our fears and discontents, the most heinous offences and frightening offenders used to blind us to the reality that those are people in our prisons, most of whose lives could be repaired.

Our leaders try to convince us that the health of the so-called job creators is more important than that of the weakest among us. And, it seems, many of the richest and most powerful come to believe this and act on that basis, what some have called “trickle-down meanness,” one of the consequences of rising inequality, particularly when growth disproportionately benefits a small group of super-rich able effectively to secede from society and its mutual obligations. On measures of equality, we are slipping to the bottom relative to other rich countries.

The debate brewing about how to measure success is not just about measurement. It is a recognition that we need to participate in a real discussion about what we mean by the good life, the purpose of the economy, the kind of Canada we want. It is about decency and dignity. It is about our political and democratic institutions, the need to find much better ways to ensure that all voices, particularly those speaking for the marginalized, are heard. This may be the only way to restore a sense of the common good and win back the many who have given up on politics, party and government.

- And lest there be any doubt, the trend toward gorging at the top is only continuing - as the CCPA points out in its annual reminder that our CEOs have already soaked up more money in 2013 than the average Canadian will all year.

- Finally, I don't recall seeing too many Canadian examples of the U.S.' trend toward embarrassingly contrived equivalances between parties. But Michael Valpy makes quite the effort, placing scattered comments from a T-shirt design shop and unnamed "Internet posters" on par with the systematic demonization and defunding of dissenting voices by the Harper Cons' cabinet in order to blame all sides for a "politics of discord".

New column day

Here, on the danger that Stephen Harper's long-term plan for Canada includes unelected Senators taking a page out of the Republicans' obstructionist playbook to keep elected officials from doing their jobs.

For further reading, see Charles Pierce and Michael Cohen on the Republicans' destructive template. And I've previously pointed out here and here that unaccountable senators with no respect for conventions or the public interest could easily use a similar strategy to negate the choices of Canadian voters.

Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Frank Graves writes about the decline of Canada's middle class - and notes a parallel between the type of economy which tends to produce broad social failure, and the Cons' familiar obsession with extraction:

The other key factor is rising inequality and a failing middle class. Our evidence has shown that as economic issues have become the dominant concerns for Canadians they are — for the first time in our research — twinned at the pinnacle of public issues with blended concerns about fairness and inequality. These are not the traditional and more modest concerns we have seen about the gap between the rich and poor. The new and more potent linkage is the gap between the über rich and everyone else. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in what can only be described as the crisis of the middle class.

The middle class has always been by far the most popular self-defined class denomination in upper North America — one of the reasons it is such a popular political target. The 20th century ascension of the United States to the “hyperpower” status it enjoyed as little as a decade ago was largely the culmination of an unprecedented period of middle class ascendance.
...
In analysing why societies fail, Daron Acemoğlu has a very insightful theory that suggests the harbinger of societal failure is a shift from an ‘inclusive’ to an ‘extractive’ economy. The swelling of upper North America’s middle class in the 20th century is a shining example of a successful inclusive economy. Among other examples, Acemoğlu argues that Venice went from backwater to world powerhouse and back to a sterile urban museum-in-waiting when it shifted from an inclusive to an extractive economy. The diminution of taxes and public services and the rise of the ‘one per cent’ has been coupled with a similar shrinkage and relative decline in the North American economy — and could be a chilling harbinger of our future economic well being.

- But look on the bright side: at least our mass-murder industry is seeing massive international growth potential thanks to the Cons' choice of trade priorities.

- Andrew Pollack discusses the latest example of how prescription drug profits can fall neatly into the pure extraction category - as a drug launched in the 1950s is now being widely sold in the U.S. for $28,000 per dose.

- Finally, Wilf Day posts a thorough rebuttal to an attempt to change Fair Vote Canada's focus from higher-level proportional representation to municipal-level instant runoff voting.

Deep thought

Much as I generally promote open access to information, I'm starting to come around to the idea that the Cons should feel free to apply a "national security" exemption to pretty much any information about their decision-making. After all, if anybody around the globe knew exactly what they're dealing with in the Cons, Canada would all too likely be a second-rate protectorate of Burundi within a week.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Holiday cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that to start the new year.

- Lynn Stuart Parramore discusses the dangers of needless means-testing for basic social benefits:

When I spoke to Joseph Stiglitz, he discussed the idea that “means-testing is mean.” Programs like Medicare and Social Security, he explained, are matters of political economy. They are important to social cohesion, where support comes from the fact that everybody is participating. “We don’t means-test public education,” explained Stiglitz, “because we believe that we want people to have the same opportunities and we lose out on that with means-testing.” The same is true of our belief that everyone deserves a dignified retirement and adequate medical care in old age.

Medicare and Social Security are not handouts to the needy. They are not even intended to be a safety net. In their design, they promote the fundamental notion that dignity and good health in old age are not special privileges that can be bestowed or taken away. They are fundamental rights that every working American who has contributed productively to the economy can expect to enjoy. As James K. Galbraith told me in an email, “It’s insurance, not charity.”

Means-testing runs against this fundamental idea by turning Medicare and Social Security into welfare programs that become bargaining chips for politicians. The programs become provisional rather than fundamental. President Franklin Roosevelt understood this point well, which is why he designed Social Security to be attached to a payroll tax so that “no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”
...
By turning Medicare and Social Security into welfare, means-testing feeds right into the Romney view of the world, an us-against-them mentality that pits the self-righteous wealthy against ordinary people. Means-testing would divide the population and further emphasize the difference between the haves and the have-nots by transferring a sense of receiving handouts to those getting Social Security and Medicare. 

- Paul Adams' look at the Libs' right-wing positioning has received plenty of attention already. But the most important observation is that Justin Trudeau looks to be following directly down the path that led the Libs to third-party status in the first place:

Of course there are a couple of narrower, more tactical reasons why Trudeau in particular may be tacking to the right. In the short term, it may be a feint designed to shake people’s preconceptions of him during the leadership race and carve out a political image distinct from that of his father.

But Liberal supporters should be concerned that it is the germ of a general election strategy: to position Trudeau not as a centre-left alternative to the Conservatives, but as a more likeable, open, honest, youthful successor to Stephen Harper. A change in personalities, in other words, rather than a change in policies.

This was essentially the strategy of Michael Ignatieff, and it didn’t work. It didn’t work in part because Ignatieff’s inexperience contrasted with Harper at a nerve-jangling time in the economy. It also didn’t work because it forced Ignatieff to tack jerkily left in the election campaign when it was apparent that the only pool of voters actually available to the Liberals were there — further muddying the already murky Liberal brand.

- Aaron Wherry looks back at 2012 in Canadian politics - and points out that there's plenty of reason to think a more meaningful democracy is well within reach:

If our democracy is not quite the vibrant construct we wish it was, there are glimmers. The government and the official opposition are led respectively by erudite policy wonks who like to imagine themselves as pugilists in the rhetorical ring—and for the first time this particular former has a comparable rival in the latter. Elizabeth May has taken up residence in the far corner and made parliamentary democracy her cause. Megan Leslie often asks questions and Michelle Rempel periodically responds. The chair of the ethics committee is 21 years old and among the most prominent members of the official opposition are half a dozen women who were born in the 1980s. Brent Rathgeber has a blog. Michael Chong and Irwin Cotler are still here, as are various other men and women of whom their constituents can be proud. And by next summer the third party will likely be led by either a man blessed of good genes, great hair and immense potential or an astronaut.

So if it is not all good, it is also not all bad. But if this past year was about anything it was that fight—those fights and that they were had and what they might amount to. In those hours and hours and hours of standing and sitting and standing and sitting for C-38 and C-45 was something like the essence of parliamentary democracy: the governing party testing the limits of what it might get away with and the opposition doing everything in its power to subject the government’s actions to scrutiny. In the Parliamentary Budget Officer and the Auditor General were necessary stalwarts. In the hashtags and shouting was the public, or at least segments thereof, imposing itself on the proceedings. The fight is not quite an end in itself. It should amount to something. Change, if decided to be necessary, must be realized. The process of perfecting this grand measure requires more than 140 characters. But it is the fight that keeps this blessed mess alive and the flame lit. Short of utopia, the fight must be had, over and over and over. (We might wish that the fight was fought on nicer or wittier terms, but we should neither expect nor desire that advancing ourselves forward won’t involve some kind of fight.)

A few months after the 2011 election, after the principles of Westminster democracy were apparently set aside in favour of a strong, stable, national government, a sizeable number of citizens paused to mourn the passing of a thoroughly political man—an individual whose last act as leader of the official opposition was to launch a 58-hour filibuster. If that week of public recognition seemed to show we were not quite yet entirely consumed by cynicism, 2012 perhaps showed the fight is not yet out of us.

- Meanwhile, the Star's review of the year in environmental policy highlights "austerity and obscurantism" as all we have to show for the Cons' decisions and actions. But on the bright side, Bruce Stewart's look at the year for the NDP reaches some rather more positive conclusions.

Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Michael Harris comments on Stephen Harper's reckless choice to gamble that Theresa Spence in particular and First Nations issues in general will go away on their own, rather than exhibiting any leadership whatsoever:

Stephen Harper has placed his bet. It is clear from his strategy that he believes he will be going neither to a meeting nor a funeral and that sufficient pressure can be brought to bear on Chief Spence that she will voluntarily discontinue her hunger strike. That is why he has placed the prestige of Leona Aglukkaq and Patrick Brazeau squarely on the barrelhead by having both of them support the government’s position.

If Harper is right, his victory will be, at best, a partial and temporary one. Yes, there will be people who will praise his steadfastness on matters of protocol as a sign of leadership. But those will mostly be white people who are simply tired of wrestling with the profound issues raised by Chief Spence.

As for Canada’s aboriginal peoples, they will have been humiliated yet again. And this time, the humiliation will have been inflicted by a government which has imposed new rules for the environment and resource development without consulting Parliament, let alone the original stewards of this land. If all Harper’s government has to give to First Nations is ceremonial gesturing, trouble — big trouble — lies ahead.

But there is also the possibility that the PM’s calculation will prove to be the biggest mistake of his political life, and one of the national tragedies of Canadian public affairs. And all because Harper has turned what should have been an exercise in emotional intelligence into just another game of political hardball.

- Susan Delacourt suggests that the de-normalization process applied to tobacco products might be appropriate for guns as well:

(I)f American politicians are serious about tackling that plague of gun violence, they might want to consider how they have dealt with the buyers and sellers of tobacco. Through a combination of bans, stigma and yes, chipping away at rights, tobacco is still a legal product but it’s been “denormalized” — removed from the mainstream of daily life, with smokers made to feel intensely responsible for the ills they inflict on society.

That wouldn’t be a bad outcome of a sustained campaign against guns either, especially that responsibility part.

Who knows? With the right mix of political will and anti-gun measures, Americans might dream of a day when neither cigarettes nor firearms are brandished in public.

- And Tabatha Southey offers up some well-deserved mockery toward the NRA's attempt to argue that the only cure for gun violence is more guns.

- Glen McGregor proposes a few simple steps toward better political reporting.

- Finally, Ipsos Reid's poll results showing over 60% of Canadians disapproving of the Cons' environmental failures are significant enough on their own. But I find some of the wording to be especially noteworthy:

The Ipsos Reid survey suggests that 61 per cent of Canadians disagree with the statement “the Harper government is doing a good job at protecting Canada’s environment.”
...
The survey also found that 63 per cent of Canadians disagree with the statement “the Harper government has struck the right balance between economic growth and environmental protection and management.”

Now, based on conventional wisdom, the latter question would be significantly more favourable to the Cons than the former: it encourages the respondent to think about what's supposed to be the party's strength on the economy, and ask whether that offsets any concern about the environment.

But apparently Ipsos Reid's respondents were even less inclined to give the Cons a pass on the environment when asked whether they'd struck the right balance than based on environmental considerations alone. And that looks to me to suggest some vulnerable territory on the economy and general trust in the Cons' decision-making along with the obvious weakness on the environment.

On forced growth

Saskatchewan's NDP leadership campaign has featured plenty of discussion as to how to define success as a party and a province. But it's well worth contrasting the varying forms of quality-of-life and social health themes being debated within the NDP against an announcement which epitomizes the appallingly narrow focus of the Wall government:

Saskatchewan's Premier Brad Wall is pledging to hike crop production by 10 million tonnes over the next decade.

According to the Saskatchewan Agriculture Ministry, total crop production was 25.9 million tonnes in 2011, up 8.7 per cent from the 2001-10 average.

...(T)he government says its growth plan is focused on increasing crop production and boosting agricultural exports.

Now, there are certainly circumstances where an increase in crop production could be a major plus for Saskatchewan.

However, there's a difference between pursuing a plan where increased production might be the result of a focus on developing healthy industries and communities, and focusing on growth-for-the-sake-of-growth. And like the Sask Party's general governing philosophy, Wall's announcement positively reeks of the latter theme.

Even putting aside the possibility of considering social health or well-being, one would expect an economic plan to at least address industrial sustainability, jobs and incomes as end goals. After all, those are the only excuses that can possibly serve to make the general public see any benefit out of corporate-focused development.

But they don't even rate a mention in Wall's preferred development path.

Instead, Wall is pitching "more stuff" as the highest possible good - with no regard for what gets produced or how changes in production patterns affect farmers, workers or communities. Which signals that we can look forward to policies favouring the most exploitative possible model of corporate farming over any interest in smaller-scale or localized production.

And of course, Wall's new focus comes at a time when both the provincial and federal governments are also going out of their way to demolish longstanding programs which ensured some balance between the short-term desire to wring every possible cent out of Saskatchewan's soil, and the province's longer-term sustainability.

In other words, Wall is apparently applying his party's rip-and-strip resource philosophy to agriculture as well at exactly the time when that approach looks to do the most damage. And we may need to start planning now to repair Wall's mess down the road.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Pam Palmater explains the historical background to Idle No More:

(M)ost Canadians are not used to the kind of sustained, co-ordinated, national effort that we have seen in the last few weeks — at least not since 1969. 1969 was the last time the federal government put forward an assimilation plan for First Nations. It was defeated then by fierce native opposition, and it looks like Harper’s aggressive legislative assimilation plan will be met with even fiercer resistance.

In order to understand what this movement is about, it is necessary to understand how our history is connected to the present-day situation of First Nations. While a great many injustices were inflicted upon the indigenous peoples in the name of colonization, indigenous peoples were never “conquered.” The creation of Canada was only possible through the negotiation of treaties between the Crown and indigenous nations. While the wording of the treaties varies from the peace and friendship treaties in the east to the numbered treaties in the west, most are based on the core treaty promise that we would all live together peacefully and share the wealth of this land. The problem is that only one treaty partner has seen any prosperity.

The failure of Canada to share the lands and resources as promised in the treaties has placed First Nations at the bottom of all socio-economic indicators — health, lifespan, education levels and employment opportunities. While indigenous lands and resources are used to subsidize the wealth and prosperity of Canada as a state and the high-quality programs and services enjoyed by Canadians, First Nations have been subjected to purposeful, chronic underfunding of all their basic human services like water, sanitation, housing, and education. This has led to the many First Nations being subjected to multiple, overlapping crises like the housing crisis in Attawapiskat, the water crisis in Kashechewan and the suicide crisis in Pikangikum.

Part of the problem is that federal “Indian” policy still has, as its main objective, to get rid of the “Indian problem.” Instead of working toward the stated mandate of Indian Affairs “to improve the social well-being and economic prosperity of First Nations,” Harper is trying, through an aggressive legislative agenda, to do what the White Paper failed to do — get rid of the Indian problem once and for all.

- And Native Writes Now notes that Christie Blatchford for one isn't shy about saying that she considers the project of eradicating any distinct First Nations culture to be complete:

What Christie Blatchford wrote is offensive to the highest degree; but it should be remembered as the most honest interpretation in a national journal of the ultimate goal of the last 150 years of cultural genocide. Once Native Peoples no longer have any of the characteristics of a nation their claim to any Aboriginal Rights and Titles no longer exist. Christie Blatchford is laying claim to the success of the Canadian governments policy of cultural genocide through assimilation.

They haven't won, but we cannot deny that they are winning. We have to acknowledge Christie Blatchford for publicly announcing the motive. We have another battle and that is the one within our communities, our homes and our minds and spirits. It is our responsibility as Native people to remain idle no more in reclaiming, protecting and preserving our identity by learning and sharing our languages, cultures, traditions, rights and history. This is where most of the battle lies, this is the victory that cannot be taken away. This is it. This is the line in the sand. Idle no more.

- Meanwhile, Naomi Wolf writes about how the previous movement which rallied significant numbers of people in pursuit of a fairer and more equal society was systematically dismantled through collaboration between governments and the corporate sector.

- But Hugh Mackenzie points out that the right-wing propaganda mills seeking to declare inequality a dead issue don't have any basis in fact for doing so:

One of the hallmarks of liberal democracies post-Second World War has been the shared sense that we are all in this together. The breadth of the middle class meant that while there are differences in the way people live, people could still remain connected to one another in fluid social relationships. The middle class has been the glue that binds.

As income inequality worsens, Canadians have become increasingly polarized. We’re divided between a tiny but immensely powerful elite that consumes a wildly disproportionate share of society’s resources and the rest of us.

We are losing that connectedness. We tend not to live in the same neighbourhoods, and when we do, figurative and literal gates that separate us mean that we might as well be living on different planets.
Our kids don’t go to the same schools. They don’t study the same things in college or university. They move into the workforce with wildly disparate life expectations and graduate with wildly different debt burdens.
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There has also been a dramatic shift in the share of those costs borne by different social groups: Elite Canadians are paying less at the same time they are castigating our public programs. They also happen to be largely insulated from the impact of the decline of public service in Canada. They don’t feel our pain.

Most Canadians, however, are affected by reduced investments in education, which has long been cast as the ticket to income mobility. The majority are affected by inflation in tuition. But those at the top of the income scale have choices. They can pay the higher fees. They can avoid the consequences of under-investment by sending their kids to private schools or to private universities in the United States.

The rest of us have to live with the consequences.

And the richest of the rich have the ultimate social choice. They can choose what society to be part of.

Thanks to global economic integration and the greater mobility that goes with it, those with means can choose which country to live in, which country to earn their living in, which country to send their children to school in, and which country to pay their taxes in, and there is no need for those countries to be the same. They have similar options in terms of gated communities and private programs tailored to those with deep pockets.

This matters at an individual level, because it says to the 99 per cent that the system isn’t fair. The physical and social infrastructure that makes our society work depends on everyone contributing their fair share of the cost, so that the majority benefits from this collective investment in one another.

- And Jordan Brennan and Jim Stanford also argue that broad-based prosperity makes for a better result for everybody than a society that exacerbates the gaps between social classes:

(T)he growing gap in income distribution — and the myriad costs it imposes on society and our governments — is not inevitable. It reflects changes in economic and political power among the different stakeholders in society. Measures that limit the power and wealth of those at the top, and reinforce the structural bargaining position of those at the bottom, can ensure a broader distribution of incomes and wealth, and allow us to capture an important economic and fiscal “equality dividend.”

Inequality need not be a partisan, left-right issue. If we learn from the scientific evidence regarding the multi-dimensional costs of inequality, we will realize that creating a shared prosperity benefits all sectors of society (not just poor people). And then policy-makers from both ends of the political spectrum can join in building a more balanced and efficient society.