Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Ken Georgetti discusses how the corporate tax giveaways of the past 15 years have hurt most Canadians:

The Conservative government and special interest groups claim incessantly that cutting corporate income taxes is good for the economy and for individual Canadians. We have been led to believe that tax giveaways to corporations would lead companies to reinvest in research and development as well as machinery and staff training to boost productivity. This is supposed to stimulate economic growth and create better paying and more secure jobs. But that is not what has happened in Canada during the past decade.

Let's look at the record since 2000, when the drive to slash corporate taxes began.  The average annual economic growth between 2000 and 2012 was 1.14 per cent, one of the longest periods of low economic growth in decades. Business investment in research and development has fallen from 1.13 per cent of GDP in 2000 to 0.88 per cent of GDP in 2012. Investment in employee training and skills development is down by 40 per cent since the 1990s. The amount spent on training per employee in Canada in 2010 was $688; in the U.S it was $1,071. And now, taxpayers will get the privilege of subsidizing companies for employee training, with the federal government's proposed Canada Jobs Grant.
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The years of tax giveaways have, indeed, been good for business. Their after tax profit margins rose from 6.9 per cent in 2000 to 8.1 per cent in 2012, and now we know what they have been doing with the money. Between 2000 and 2012, the total cash reserves of private, non-financial private corporations in Canada grew from $182 to $541 billion, an increase of over 300 per cent. During the same period, CEO pay went sky-high. The average CEO compensation at Canada's largest non-financial corporations averaged $7.96 million in 2012.

Corporate tax giveaways mean that the federal government has foregone billions of dollars in revenues. To pay for the tax breaks, Ottawa has borrowed billions of dollars and driven up the national debt. Now, the government has chosen to make big cuts to public services essential to Canadians in order to pay the bill for its tax giveaways.

We hold Corporate Tax Freedom Day to draw attention to the failure of business to deliver on its promises to Canadians. Clearly, slashing corporate tax rates did not produce the expected outcomes. No strings attached corporate tax cuts are a cruel and very expensive hoax and we should demand our money back.

- Meanwhile, Linda Nguyen reports that while the same Con/corporate grouping tries to minimize public pensions in favour of private schemes which allow the financial sector to skim massive rents off the top, the vast majority of Canadians expect to rely on the CPP and provincial equivalents to support their retirement.

- Trish Hennessy writes that Ontario should try to get on the right side of history by setting its minimum wage at a level which will keep full-time workers out of poverty. And the Wellesley Institute concurs while discussing the importance of also indexing it to inflation.

- Kev and Dan Tan are both rightly skeptical about the Libs' sudden Senate announcement (followed by almost immediate backtracking about what it actually means). But Paul Wells sums it up best:

The last two acts of Richard II are about sorting out the effects of Bolingbroke’s rash act, and I won’t spoil it for you but it gets a little messy. Similarly, it’s hard to know where the Liberal Party as a whole goes from here. Terry Mercer gave his life to this party. Dozens of other senators and their staffers, same deal. Percy Downe was Chrétien’s chief of staff; he got told this morning he has no further function as a Liberal. An NDP staffer this morning was gleeful, because with only 34 MPs and zero Senators, the Liberals may no longer qualify for a caucus room in the Centre Block. It’s not entirely clear how all this will work.

Nor is it clear it is a permanent state of affairs. The old Reform Party was dead-set against MPs’ pensions until its members started to qualify for some. Stephen Harper did not appoint a single senator until he realized Stéphane Dion had planned to appoint plenty if the coalition crisis had gone the other way. Among a thousand other backtrack scenarios, it’s possible to imagine a future Liberal prime minister — perhaps his name would be Trudeau — watching as a coherent Conservative Senate caucus blocks Liberal legislation that has gone orphan in the Senate. In the nearer term, every time a fellow or lady who still collects a Senate paycheque shows up at a gathering of Liberals, the sincerity of this divorce will be open to question.

- Finally, Matthew McKean discusses how public confidence in politics may be the most important factor in improving voter turnout (and presumably public participation in many forms as well). And the Cons' consistent attempts to weasel their way out of responsibility for their actions surely can't be helping matters.

New column day

Here, questioning the Saskatchewan Party's belief that meeting the province's constitutional duty to provide correctional centre inmates with the basic necessities of life isn't a "core" government function.

For further reading:
- CTV reports on the label the Sask Party has applied to correctional food services (and the resulting privatization process) here. 
- And once again, CBC reports here on the cautionary tale of Ontario's highway maintenance - where public safety has been compromised in the name of outsourcing provincial services.

Deep thought

The Liberals, at their self-perceived best, lag many years behind the principled curve set by the NDP.

(Meanwhile, who's taking odds as to the number of formerly-Lib Senators who will be recruited by the we'll-take-anybody Greens?)

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- John Cassidy offers ten options to reduce income inequality. And Andrew Coyne concurs with the first and most important suggestion that income supports sufficient to provide a stable living to everybody would make for the ideal solution.

- Meanwhile, Frances Russell is the latest to write that the Cons' income-splitting scheme is only designed to exacerbate the gap between the rich and the rest of us. Miles Corak notes that even Republicans can't avoid recognizing that equality of opportunity is fading in the U.S. - though he recognizes their inclination to avoid acknowledging the role of inequality as a cause. Logan Sachon interviews a few members of the precariat about about the extreme obstacles facing people who have to juggle part-time and temporary jobs for lack of full-time opportunities. And in an interview with Josh Eidelson, John Schmitt discusses how the U.S. has chosen inequality and worker suppression as the basis for its economic policy over the past several decades:

Workers today are a lot older than they were in the 1960s or the 1970s, and they are enormously better-educated than they were in the 1960s or 1970s. The fact that most workers are doing barely better, and some workers are doing worse than their counterparts from 40 or 50 years ago … suggest that the problem is that the way the economy converts people’s skills, people’s experience, people’s education and their training, into good jobs is what has deteriorated over this period. Not people’s underlying skills, or work experience, or education.

And I think it points to something completely different — and I think it’s absent from a lot of the discussion as [to] the reasons why we have economic inequality, and the reasons why we have these continuous problems with mobility and opportunity. And that has to do with bargaining power of workers. And you know, that I think is a piece that’s unfortunately missing from the president’s discussion of economic inequality, and it’s absent from his discussion of mobility and opportunity.

The way the economy has been restructured over the last three or four decades has removed the bargaining power of workers at the middle and the bottom. And it’s done that in a very systematic way.
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It doesn’t stop there … Immigrant workers have almost no rights under our labor law … Because their position is so weak, it undermines the power of low-wage workers who were born here and have — barely — more rights … It creates a perfect set of circumstances for low-wage employers, because they can play immigrant workers against U.S.-born workers, in an environment where neither of them has very many rights. So businesses don’t have a big incentive to try and fix that situation …

We’ve had trade deals such as [the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership], which we’re discussing right now, which are basically organized to increase the power, economic power of corporations, and to undermine the power of their workers and consumers.

You know, we privatized state and local government functions at quite an alarming rate … The main advantage that the private sector has over the public sector is not that they’re more efficient at organizing school buses. It’s that they pay their workers less and they don’t give them benefits …

That discussion of bargaining power, and the politics and the policies around it, is firstly what’s going to be missing from the State of the Union address.

- Speaking of privatization, Travis Homenuk criticizes the Sask Party's plan to privatize food services in correctional centres. CBC reports that Ontario's highways are suffering from the poor performance of private maintenance operations - though it's far from clear that the imposition of contractual fines makes up for the injuries suffered by citizens due to contractor neglect. And Sean Shaw discusses how P3s are at best a matter of accounting and budgeting trickery rather than value for public money.

- But Matthew Taylor reports that the trend toward privatization is far from universal - as a cross-party group of UK MPs is working on legislation to keep public services public.

- Finally, the CP reports that the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation has understandably given up on a federal environmental monitoring program. And while it's understandable that nobody would trust, say, a government which puts oil lobbyists on the public payroll to stop environmental research, there's all the more work to be done in ensuring that First Nations with much to lose (or gain) from tar sands development can engage in meaningful discussions with the next federal government.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Joined cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- David MacDonald studies the effect of the Cons' income-splitting scheme, and finds that it's oriented purely toward funnelling money toward the top of the income scale:

“Income splitting creates a tax loophole big enough to drive a Rolls Royce through. It’s pitched as a program for the middle class but in reality it’s an expensive tax gift for the rich,” says Macdonald. “The upper third of Canada’s richest families would receive $3 of every $4 spent on income splitting.”

The study finds seven out of ten senior families get no benefit at all from pension income splitting and the richest 10% of senior families receive more than the bottom 70% combined. The cost of pension income splitting for senior couples in 2015 is estimated at $1.7 billion ($1.2 billion federally and $500 million provincially). In contrast, it would cost $1.5 billion a year to lift all Canadian seniors out of poverty.

The study examines the Conservative plan to extend income splitting to families with children under 18 and finds:

• 86% of all families would gain no benefit whatsoever from this tax loophole.
• The richest 5% of families would see more benefit than the bottom 60% of families combined.
• The bottom 60% of families would receive, on average, $50. The richest 5% of Canadian families — those making over $147,000 — would see an average benefit of $1,100.
• This loophole would cost the federal government $3 billion in lost revenue and an additional $1.9 billion provincially — for a total revenue loss of $4.9 billion in 2015 alone.

- Ian Welsh offers up his four principles necessary for genuine prosperity - featuring fairness, kindness, generosity and a focus on the future as an antidote to the corporate attempt to make a virtue out of greed. Which leads to my further observation that we'd be better off with more Ian Welsh.

- Meanwhile, Paul Krugman observes that U.S. voters are starting to recognize their country's class structure (and to develop due skepticism about policies intended to further the concentration of wealth at the top). And Tim Hudak may be facing the same lesson, as his attacks on workers run into the reality that organized labour produces better outcomes for the population as a whole.

- But David Atkins notes that there's a long way to go in protecting workers' rights and well-being - and that the focus may need to include global treaties which remove any opportunity for employers to seek out havens for employee abuse:

The lesson should be obvious: the more international and legally binding the agreement, the more helpful it will be to workers in developing nations. The more expansive and multi-party the treaties are, the less competitive labor arbitrage risk will entail for any nation that improves factory conditions. Voluntary commitments from multinational corporations will do little to prevent the next tragedy.

Labor and worker protection agreements are in their infancy at the highest international levels. But with multinational corporations increasingly able to use labor arbitrage to manufacture products in nations with the weakest worker protections, the international community must take a stand in creating legally binding, global treaties that are proactive in nature, and carry negative trade consequences for those nations that choose to flout or ignore them.

- Finally, Jennifer Hollett talks about her political experience so far:

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Angelina Chapin highlights the drastic impact a guaranteed annual income would have on Canadians currently living in poverty:

To set and meet goals, you have to think long-term. When you’re poor, you can’t focus on the future (and Bill Gates wasn’t raised poor, by the way). You worry about finding boots, not pulling up your straps. The best way to “motivate” poor people is with programs that help lift their gaze from the ground to the horizon. A guaranteed annual income program would do that.

The idea is simple: in place of a complicated welfare system, give people enough money to live above the poverty line in their region (Ontario’s Low Income Cut-Off was $22,229 for a single person in 2011). No strings attached. The less you make, the more guaranteed income you receive.
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Just getting on social assistance is a commitment to poverty. To receive it in Ontario, you can’t have more than $1,657 in liquid assets, which could mean selling a car or giving up savings to qualify. There are at least five administrative steps to continually get welfare. Once you’re in the social assistance system, there’s not much incentive to leave.
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As soon as a welfare recipient starts making any real income, social assistance benefits, subsidized housing and prescription drug money are all cut to some degree. The GAI program would still guarantee any employed person below the poverty line a top-up to, you know, encourage rather than punish their progress.

Many critics of the GAI, ironically, suffer from their own inability to think long-term. They complain about the initial costs, which in Canada could be anywhere from $30-to-$50 billion per year, according to Basic Income Pilot founder Jesse Helmer. But over time, the recipients’ lifestyle changes drive the price down. Citizens for Public Justice estimates that a GAI income could reduce crime costs by $1-2 billion and health-care costs by $7-8 billion annually.

If we could just accept the mound of data showing poor people aren’t degenerates who don’t set their alarm clocks early enough, there would be more support for programs that give people enough money to think ahead.

- But as Paul Krugman notes, the need for more thought about the bigger picture is as much a problem at the top of the income distribution as at the bottom:

Rising inequality has obvious economic costs: stagnant wages despite rising productivity, rising debt that makes us more vulnerable to financial crisis. It also has big social and human costs. There is, for example, strong evidence that high inequality leads to worse health and higher mortality.

But there’s more. Extreme inequality, it turns out, creates a class of people who are alarmingly detached from reality — and simultaneously gives these people great power.

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But every group finds itself facing criticism, and ends up on the losing side of policy disputes, somewhere along the way; that’s democracy. The question is what happens next. Normal people take it in stride; even if they’re angry and bitter over political setbacks, they don’t cry persecution, compare their critics to Nazis and insist that the world revolves around their hurt feelings. But the rich are different from you and me.

And yes, that’s partly because they have more money, and the power that goes with it. They can and all too often do surround themselves with courtiers who tell them what they want to hear and never, ever, tell them they’re being foolish. They’re accustomed to being treated with deference, not just by the people they hire but by politicians who want their campaign contributions. And so they are shocked to discover that money can’t buy everything, can’t insulate them from all adversity.

- In a similar vein, Carol Goar criticizes Chris Alexander as the latest Con to try to win political points by attacking the health of some of the most vulnerable people in Canada:

“There was hope that the government might decide to change the discourse,” said Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council of Refugees.

It gradually dissipated. The last thread snapped a week ago when Alexander lambasted Ontario for its “scandalous” decision to provide medical care to “bogus” asylum seekers.

“It’s irresponsible,” he railed. “It’s also unfair to for taxpayers.”

His tirade set a new low in intergovernmental relations. It signalled that any Canadian office-holder who showed compassion, tried to mitigate the harm Ottawa is doing or defended the values jettisoned by Stephen Harper’s regime was open to attack.
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In the short term, (Dench) and her colleagues will continue to stand up for refugees, reach out to sympathetic Canadians and do what they can to soften public opinion. Their hope is that the 2015 election will bring a change of government and a change of heart.

They’ve given up on Alexander. He had the talent, the knowledge, the international experience and the diplomatic skill to be an exemplary minister of citizenship and immigration. He chose instead to use his power to crack down on sick, vulnerable people.

- Meanwhile, Robert Reich points out that the more successful the privileged are in suppressing the well-being of those below them in the short term, the more likely we are to see wrenching changes in the longer term.

- Finally, Stanley Tromp reports on the findings of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about the transportation of tar sands products - featuring much-needed recognition that the Cons and their oil-sector cronies have done nothing to evaluate the new and real risks of shipping dangerous products through sensitive areas. And Transportation Safety Board chair Wendy Tadros confirms that outdated tanker cars create a risk of more Lac-Mégantic-style disasters, while Greg Gormick calls for a combination of public investment and better regulation to ensure rail safety.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your weekend.

- Jeremy Nuttall discusses why the Cons' temporary foreign worker program is ripe for abuse, as it ensures workers have every incentive to avoid reporting employer wrongdoing since the employer can singlehandedly ship the employee out of Canada in retaliation.

- But the good news is that workers who aren't quite so easily sent away are making efforts to fight back against the Cons' anti-labour plans - as Kathryn May reports on a pledge among public service unions not to give in to attacks on sick leave and disability benefits. And on the provincial level, SOS Crowns exposes and questions the Saskatchewan Party's privatization of essential infrastructre.

- John Geddes discusses what the Cons want to eliminate in order to make way for subsidies tied to specific employers:

Schemes to place hard-to-employ young people in jobs tend to come and go. BladeRunners is the exception. The British Columbia program has been around since 1994, long enough that even its managers aren’t entirely clear on how it got its name—and for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to single it out as a proven model. BladeRunners helps unemployed 15- to 30-year-olds—mostly Aboriginal, sometimes homeless, often with histories of substance abuse—learn basic skills and land several key weeks of job experience. Counsellors are on call around the clock when participants run into the inevitable problems.

It sounds like the sort of feel-good program any politician might rush to line up behind. But the B.C. provincial government cites BladeRunners as a prime example of the kind of training that the federal Conservatives are out to cut. At issue is the so-called Canada Job Grant (CJG), announced by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty with considerable fanfare in last year’s federal budget. Under the CJG, Flaherty proposed that the federal government, the provinces and employers each pay a third of up to $15,000 a year for every employee enrolled for training at an eligible institution. But there was a catch: The federal government’s $300-million share was to be taken out of the $500 million a year Ottawa transfers to provinces under existing labour-market agreements—the main source of BladeRunners’ $6-million budget.

- Finally, Ketaki Gohale reports on the level of social responsibility we can expect from big pharma (which we should keep in mind the next time it claims that giveaways are needed to support the development and commercialization of medication):

Bayer Chief Executive Officer Marijn Dekkers called the compulsory license “essentially theft.”

“We did not develop this medicine for Indians,” Dekkers said Dec. 3. “We developed it for western patients who can afford it.”

Fortunately, Médecins Sans Frontières offers up the appropriate response.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Lana Payne calls out Stephen Harper's hypocrisy in paying lip service to the problems with the use of disposable temporary foreign labour while expanding exactly that policy throughout his stay in power:

The program was supposed to be a last resort for employers dealing with skills shortages and used in a truly temporary fashion to fill high skill gaps until Canadians could be trained for those jobs.

That has not been the case under the current federal Conservative government. Not only has the program been used as a source of cheap labour, it has been riddled with abuses and has undermined the need for real immigration.

The result has been what is fast becoming a permanent underclass of workers who have little to no rights, who are especially vulnerable as their conditions of employment and entry into the country are completely tied to their boss and who are quite hesitant to complain about any problems out of fear of losing their employment and being sent back to their home country. They are ripe for exploitation.
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At this point, it appears as if the prime minister is trying to play both sides off against the middle. While he may sound surprised, the fact remains that actions speak louder than words. And his government’s actions have been to allow the very real problems with the program to continue while knowing their merely cosmetic changes would have little impact.

The prime minister went on to say that companies have used the TFWP in ways that were not in the interest of Canadians. “That kind of abuse cannot go on,” he said.

Well, Mr. Harper, in case you need a reminder: you are the prime minister. It is certainly within your power to make sure the conditions for the abuses to occur are eliminated. Better yet, eliminate the program and start from scratch.

- Stuart Trew wonders why the TPP - like so many trade agreements - would be sealed behind closed doors with no public input or knowledge of its contents if it were intended to serve the interests of anybody but the privileged few in the room:

In Canada, we have a permanent ‘fast track’ situation in which MPs only ever get to vote yes or no to trade deals. There’s no option to say ‘yes’ to the tariff package and ‘no’ to longer drug patents or copyright terms. Harper won’t even release a cost-benefit assessment of the TPP to trade committee MPs — the people who are supposed to be studying the deal. The only information we have about Canada’s negotiating positions comes from leaks, which Canadian negotiators refuse to talk about.

Pipeline opponents have every right to demand to see environmental assessments of proposed routes and a voice on approval hearings. This is permanent energy infrastructure with often greater risks to the environment than the economic rewards can cover. Modern trade deals like the TPP, which are about much more than tariffs, create a legal infrastructure with permanent and potentially harmful effects on our economy and communities. The process for approving them should be no less transparent.

- Boris discusses the inevitable result of putting the state's secret surveillance mechanisms in the hands of the oil sector. PressProgress highlights the connections between the Con-approved CNOOC and shady offshore tax evasion. And having been publicly confronted with the conflict between the interests of Enbridge and those of the public, Chuck Strahl has made his choice.

- Meanwhile, just another (TransCanada) pipeline explosion. Nothing to see here.

- Finally, Murray Mandryk rightly notes that the continued structural disadvantages facing First Nations Canadians should be our greatest shame as a country.

Musical interlude

Beth Orton - Yesterday's Gone

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Robert Reich confirms the seemingly obvious reality that poverty and inequality are in fact major obstacle facing the poor. And Paul Krugman explains why any successful progressive movement in the U.S. will need to discuss inequality and the hoarding of wealth to challenge the entrenched (and expanding) influence of those who already have the most:

(J)obs and inequality are closely linked if not identical issues. There’s a pretty good although not ironclad case that soaring inequality helped set the stage for our economic crisis, and that the highly unequal distribution of income since the crisis has perpetuated the slump, especially by making it hard for families in debt to work their way out.

Moreover, there’s an even stronger case to be made that high unemployment — by destroying workers’ bargaining power — has become a major source of rising inequality and stagnating incomes even for those lucky enough to have jobs.

Beyond that, as a political matter, inequality and macroeconomic policy are already inseparably linked. It has been obvious for a long time that the deficit obsession that has exerted such a destructive effect on policy these past few years isn’t really driven by worries about the federal debt. It is, instead, mainly an effort to use debt fears to scare and bully the nation into slashing social programs — especially programs that help the poor. 

- And Jordan Weissman offers a reminder that Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy includes a commitment to a guaranteed income:

King had an even more expansive vision. He laid out the case for the guaranteed income in his final book, 1967's Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Washington's previous efforts to fight poverty, he concluded, had been "piecemeal and pygmy." The government believed it could lift up the poor by attacking the root causes of their impoverishment one by one—by providing better housing, better education, and better support for families. But these efforts had been too small and too disorganized. Moreover, he wrote, "the programs of the past all have another common failing—they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else."

It was time, he believed, for a more straightforward approach: the government needed to make sure every American had a reasonable income.

- Meanwhile, Chris Bowers shows that a genuinely progressive take on politics can be a political winner by looking at past U.S. partisan support. And Thomas Mulcair is likewise demonstrating that a challenge to corporate control can resonate with the general public in Canada.

- Finally, following up on the theme of yesterday's column, Matthew Robinson and Mike de Souza report that the shipment of oil by rail is actually increasing even in the wake of the Lac-Mégantic explosion. And Adam Gamble highlights Regina's SomerSet development as a prime example of warnings being utterly ignored in the name of immediate gratification.

On official business

It's no surprise that the Cons' idea of accountability for themselves is to provide nothing but blank pages when faced with a request for information about their dealings with Senate reimbursements. But one of the reasons for the secrecy looks like a noteworthy story in itself.

Here's the exemption being applied to several pages of the record:

21. The head of a government institution may refuse to disclose any record requested under this Act that contains
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(b) an account of consultations or deliberations in which directors, officers or employees of a government institution, a minister of the Crown or the staff of a minister participate, 

While the provision isn't as explicit as it could be, the exemption generally refers to consultations or deliberations involving government policy (Canadian Council of Christian Charities v. Canada (Minister of Finance), [1999] 4 FC 245 at para. 30, 32):

Despite the importance of governmental openness as a safeguard against the abuse of power, and as a necessary condition for democratic accountability, it is equally clear that governments must be allowed a measure of confidentiality in the policy-making process. To permit or to require the disclosure of advice given by officials, either to other officials or to ministers, and the disclosure of confidential deliberations within the public service on policy options, would erode government's ability to formulate and to justify its policies.
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On the other hand, of course, democratic principles require that the public, and this often means the representatives of sectional interests, are enabled to participate as widely as possible in influencing policy development. Without a degree of openness on the part of government about its thinking on public policy issues, and without access to relevant information in the possession of government, the effectiveness of public participation will inevitably be curbed.

In contrast, personal matters are covered by the separate exemption under section 19 (also applied to much of the Senate document request).

In other words, by the Privy Council's own account, communications between some combination of Harper, the PCO and Duffy about the Senate expense scandal were dealt with as a matter of government policy rather than mere personal (or indeed partisan) discussions. Which further discredits the "Nigel Wright acted alone" and "I couldn't have known" lines of spin from Harper - while raising all the more need for an accurate account of Harper's own participation.

New column day

Here, on how the reactions of the federal government and the rail industry six months after the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion only seem to reinforce the risk of more disasters to come.

For further reading...
- Monique Beaudin reports on the finger-pointing and other attempts to avoid responsibility on the part of the corporations linked to the explosion. And I'll especially highlight the chutzpah of the group of oil services companies in arguing that as U.S. companies, they're entitled to ship oil through Canada while being above the law when it comes to cleanup of a spill.
- Meanwhile, David Sharp reports on the sale of MMA.
- Today's news of some additional review of the dangers of shipping by rail by the Transportation Safety Board represents some improvement - at least compared to last week's report about the elimination of the federal government's emergency directive following lobbying by CN and other railways.
- But it remains to be seen whether the Cons will follow through on the recommendations. And in light of TransCanada's declaration that it wants to set up a massive set of new infrastructure to ship oil by rail, there's a real possibility that the Cons will include shipment by rail in their list of oil-industry actions which must never be questioned no matter how explosive the consequences.
- Don Braid at least recognizes the need for more credibility in talking about the effects of tar sands development, but also implies the problem is one of branding rather than substance.
- And finally, David Climenhaga discusses the backlash against Neil Young's modest effort to draw attention to the health and rights of First Nations:

Refusal to bend to the will of this nearly omnipotent and omnipresent industry, with its vast wealth and numberless retainers, hirelings and toadies in government and media can be a risky proposition -- as we have all seen with the hysterical and unremitting national campaign against rocker Neil Young throughout the past few days.

Young's crime? Publicly supporting a northern Alberta First Nation that's fighting Bitumen Sands expansion on its traditional land. That Young has given as good as he got, and held his own against this tide of rage and fury, has given this story a David-and-Goliath quality that has many ordinary Canadians shaking their heads and wondering, "What are they afraid of?"

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Pierre Brochu and David Green study the effect of minimum wage rates, and find a connection between a higher minimum wage and greater employment stability. But if there's a choice between stable, well-paying work and precarious employment where job churn and wage reductions are seen as the norm, far too many policy-makers are choosing the latter - as Annie Lowrey notes that U.S. states are actively slashing benefits for unemployed workers to force them to grab desperately at whatever is available.

- Meanwhile, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato and Owen Zidar offer reason to doubt the theory that corporate tax giveaways have any redeeming social value. And Toby Sanger calls out Gwyn Morgan for attacking workers' pensions as being too lavish while collecting millions each year himself (plus enjoying preferential tax treatment on his stock options).

- Martha Rosenberg looks at six examples of drugs which were approved and mass-marketed in the face of massive risks and side effects - as big pharma chased down immediate profits at the expense of unwitting patients. And Scott Stelmaschuk highlights the lack of real choice for consumers - not to mention the lack of investment in the public interest - where a few well-connected corporate entities control most of the major goods and services people need.

- Sticking to the subject of illusions of choice, Thomas Walkom reminds us of the Libs' track record in federal government - featuring their simultaneously taking credit for both introducing and slashing the public programs which once did more to mitigate against corporate domination.

- Finally, Deborah Campbell interviews Ron Diebert about the dangers of mass surveillance. And Nafeez Ahmed provides a prime example of the type of excuse being used to brand large numbers of citizens as potential threats, noting that mere opposition to fracking has resulted in activists being labeled as terrorists.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Splayed cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Erika Shaker rightly questions why government policy toward business is based on a level of permissiveness which we'd recognize as utter madness in dealing with a child:

Sure, all parents make mistakes, and all kids have meltdowns (some of which might have, admittedly, been handled better).

But it seems to me that even the worst examples of permissive parenting pale in comparison to the way politicians and pundits coddle, make excuses, and encourage double standards for questionable (even deplorable) behaviour from corporations and their representatives.

And perhaps it’s the post-holiday sugar-and-excessive-consumerism hangover talking, but I’m tired of being held hostage by self-indulgent, narcissistic tyrants, whose endless “gimmes” and “I want that…or elses” seem so utterly pervasive that I feel as though I’m trapped at a Toys “R” Us outlet sale (whereupon, after my third coffee, I discover the washrooms are out of order).

These days it seems the capitulation-impulse is so hair-trigger that often the actual demands (“Cut your salaries in half or I’m running away to Indiana where they just approved Right-to-Work!”) aren’t even necessary. It’s the anticipation of the demands—or fear of the consequences to be suffered if the unvoiced demands aren’t met—that results in a smorgasbord of pre-emptive tax-cut-esque goodies in an attempt to avoid the surely inevitable breath-holding tantrum. (Or reneging on job commitments—am I right, U.S. Steel?)
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It’s the steadfast refusal to acknowledge that bad behaviour should have consequences; that corporations are required to negotiate fairly and should not expect governments—like doting helicopter parents—to constantly remove all obstacles in the path of profit; that ultimately by allowing rules to be bent or broken with near-impunity we are setting very dangerous precedents and ensuring that the cycle of toddler-like consequence-free behaviour will continue.

- Meanwhile, the CLC highlights the temporary foreign worker program as a prime example of that tendency to grease the skids toward higher profits. Mitchell Anderson contrasts Norway's strategy of saving resource wealth for the benefit of its citizens against Alberta's willingness to pile up debt to hand money to oil barons. And Alex Andreou discusses the broken promises underlying trickle-down economics:

If one subscribes to the charitable view that neoliberal philosophy was simply naive or misguided in thinking that "trickle down" would work infinitely, then evidence that it doesn't, should be cause for concern. It is a fundamental building block of supply-side economic theory – the tool of choice these past few decades for those in charge to make adjustments. The realisation that governments have been pulling at economic levers which, for some time, have been attached to nothing, should be a wake-up call to the deepest sleepers.
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It is not so much that the supply-side principle "if you build it, they will come" is no longer true. It is more that we appear to have passed a tipping point, where so much wealth has been concentrated at the top, they no longer need bother to "build" anything. In short, it has become more economically efficient to buy countries' economic policy than to create value in order to sell it on. If one can control government to favour the richest, while raising barriers for new entrants, thus increasing their share of the pie exponentially, what is the incentive to grow the pie?
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We have come to measure, to an increasing extent, individuals' success by their wealth, spending power and other assorted trappings. We do the same with the economic success of governments; measure it by an aggregated data set that fails to take into account wealth distribution, educational achievement, innovation, or even the welfare and health of the population they claim to represent. We must shift this perspective. It will be the hardest, simplest thing we have ever had to do as a species.

- Justin Ling offers his ideas to reform Canada's political system in response to Kevin Page's previous op-ed. But I'd argue that Ling's second and third points can be readily improved: I'd rather see the reinstatement of general funding for parties than Ling's proposed support only for specific activities, and would think it's possible to be far more ambitious about the expansion of information and privacy laws to include both government (including ministers' offices) and political parties alike.

- Finally, the WoodGreen Community Services' skewering of celebrity culture is well worth a look (and a share):

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Graeme Wearden reports on Oxfam's latest study on inequality and the outsized political influence of the wealthy few:

The Oxfam report found that over the past few decades, the rich have successfully wielded political influence to skew policies in their favour on issues ranging from financial deregulation, tax havens, anti-competitive business practices to lower tax rates on high incomes and cuts in public services for the majority. Since the late 1970s, tax rates for the richest have fallen in 29 out of 30 countries for which data are available, said the report.

This "capture of opportunities" by the rich at the expense of the poor and middle classes has led to a situation where 70% of the world's population live in countries where inequality has increased since the 1980s and 1% of families own 46% of global wealth - almost £70tn.

Opinion polls in Spain, Brazil, India, South Africa, the US, UK and Netherlands found that a majority in each country believe that wealthy people exert too much influence. Concern was strongest in Spain, followed by Brazil and India and least marked in the Netherlands.
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Oxfam is calling on those gathered at WEF to pledge: to support progressive taxation and not dodge their own taxes; refrain from using their wealth to seek political favours that undermine the democratic will of their fellow citizens; make public all investments in companies and trusts for which they are the ultimate beneficial owners; challenge governments to use tax revenue to provide universal healthcare, education and social protection; demand a living wage in all companies they own or control; and challenge other members of the economic elite to join them in these pledges.

- Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute is assembling support among economists for an increase in the U.S.' minimum wage. And Rob Rainer discusses why Canada should ensure a basic income guarantee as a matter of values and conscience.

- Bloomberg reports on the latest Enbridge oil spill just outside Regina. But Sheila Pratt points out why we probably can't expect even another incident close to home to lead to any meaningful public discussion - noting that the atmosphere of tar sands intimidation in Alberta has reached the point where doctors are refusing to treat patients who observe a connection between their illnesses and oil development.

- Finally, Gerald Caplan discusses the reality Stephen Harper should try to see during the course of his trip to Israel - while acknowledging the certainty that Harper will avoid it at all costs.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Leo Panitch reminds us that the term "reform" was once understood to represent efforts to bolster the public interest against unbridled market forces - and suggests it's well past time to take the word back from the business interests who have turned it into just the opposite. 

- Paul Krugman comments on the twin myths of the undeserving poor and the deserving rich. And Sam Polk writes from experience about the mindset that drives money addicts to demand that others' basic needs give way to their desire to accumulate:

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.

I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the ‘60s, I would have been on that bus.

But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them. During the market crash in 2008, I’d made a ton of money by shorting the derivatives of risky companies. As the world crumbled, I profited. I’d seen the crash coming, but instead of trying to help the people it would hurt the most — people who didn’t have a million dollars in the bank — I’d made money off it. I don’t like who you’ve become, my girlfriend had said years earlier. She was right then, and she was still right. Only now, I didn’t like who I’d become either.

Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.

- Susan Delacourt theorizes that Twitter is becoming the defining communication mechanism for political leaders. And Konrad Yakabuski writes about the dark side of detailed political data collection - as the same information which can help parties reach supporters may also be used to target non-supporters for punishment and exclusion if there's no mechanism to test how it's used.

- Finally, Kevin Page suggests that we won't be able to make any progress in dealing with economic and social issues without first ensuring that our political system functions to serve the public interest rather than its own:

Income inequality is increasing in Canada and international comparisons put us well behind many European countries. The richest 1 per cent in Canada earns about 10.5 per cent of income, up from about 7 per cent some 30 years ago. About 9 per cent of our population lives in poverty, including some 570,000 of our children. Without aggressive action, these numbers are bound to get worse, not better.

Canadians have also added a lot of debt to our balance sheets. The ratio of household financial liabilities to household disposable income now sits at a record high 166 per cent, compared to 110 per cent in 2000. And as Canadians try to pay off this increased debt, inevitably consumption will further decrease, adding to more economic drift or stagnation.

So how do we get out of this dangerous spiral? One thing is clear: we cannot overcome the pressing economic challenges before us without the concerted effort of our government institutions. And yet in the wake of a year of scandal, those institutions are more distracted and less able to help than ever before.

The Prime Minister will not stand accountable for the actions of his own office. The Senate has lost trust over a spending scandal. The House of Commons has lost its power of the purse. Members of Parliament are forced to vote on appropriations without the information they need. The public service has become dangerously good at avoiding transparency and accountability.

Without rebuilding — and rebuilding trust in — the bodies charged with protecting our prosperity and democracy, we will continue to drift aimlessly, to put off the thinking we must put off no longer.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Bill Kerry writes that extreme inequality serves to reinforce itself - and points out what needs to be done to counter the temptation to kick others down:

One of the major difficulties in tackling inequality is the way it coerces many people into accepting and even promoting it. In a steep social hierarchy people will often choose to shore up their own precarious social position by kicking down on poorer, weaker folk rather than challenging the richer more powerful folk above them.
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So what do we do about it?  Well, it’s quite straightforward if not at all easy; we have to reduce economic inequality. It is material differences that create social distances. To narrow social distances we have to reduce material differences. If this all sounds rather abstract just consider your own social life. Chances are your friends are pretty much like you in terms of material status. How many of us can genuinely say that we have friends that range widely across the income spectrum?  Generally, we mix with people not too dissimilar to ourselves. We usually stick to our socio-economic hefts – where we feel comfortable and where reciprocity is likely if not guaranteed; in other words, where we feel safest and most secure, free from judgement or reproach by others. And sometimes, when our hefts are invaded by those not quite PLU (People Like Us) we can feel uneasy.

Unless we reduce the material differences between us, our society will continue to fracture and the quality of our social relations will deteriorate. Those at the top of the income and social spectrum will continue to weave myths about their own talents and falsehoods about the shortcomings of others. Those in the middle who believe (erroneously it seems) that they have the chance to join the top table will increasingly buy in to these twisted ideas and those at the bottom will likely feel the need to fight harder amongst themselves for status and respect at the bottom. Not a pretty picture and one that can be avoided if we act to reduce inequality and start to build social solidarity instead.

- And Ryan Meili comments on the growing consensus that inequality needs to be remediated, while recognizing the factors which have limited the policy progress so far:

However much attention this issue merits, there is an inconvenient truth that few in the realm of politics are willing to discuss. To deal with income inequality, and thus prevent the economic and social harms it causes, some people have to be paid less than they’re currently earning and some people more. The incomes of those at the top of the scale and those at the bottom aren’t going to magically gravitate toward one another.

There needs to be a conscious decision, before or after taxes, to increase equality.

Perhaps this uncomfortable fact explains the fleeting attention paid to the whopping salaries of the top earners relative to the rest of us. Despite the growing chorus of concern, governments have been loath to legislate increased wages or even to effectively tax executive compensation (much of the pay of the highest earning CEOs is in stock options which are taxed at a lower rate than cash income). The flattening of tax rates and a laissez-faire approach to the economy are simply too sacrosanct to address, even in the face of mounting evidence of their harm.

- Meanwhile, PressProgress highlights the connection between high levels of unionization and reduced levels of poverty - while also pointing out Peter Edwards' recognition of the role of unions in winning basic labour rights. And Matthew O'Brien discusses the link between poverty and a readily-observed (and theoretically simple to resolve) health issue - as poor people are significantly more likely to be hospitalized due to hypoglycemia as their access to food runs out at the end of each month.

- Monique Beaudin reports on the finger-pointing contest as every single corporation with ties to the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion tries to evade responsibility for the damage it caused. And Ned Resnikoff discusses the devastating effect of a pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas.

- But of course, the Cons and their oil-sector allies are doing their utmost to prevent anybody from pointing out the dangers of an effectively unregulated rip-and-ship economy. And while the likes of Stephen Maher and Bruce Johnstone spend at least as much time challenging Neil Young's comments about the tar sands as recognizing that he raises points which demand some public discussion, Tim Gray recognizes the only action which could actually answer the concerns shared by Young and many Canadians:

It is time for our governments and leaders to come to terms with the shortfalls of the tar sands, which are some of the highest polluting oil in a carbon-constrained world. We still have time to catch up in the clean energy economy, but it is only going to get more difficult the longer we wait. Right now, many countries around the world, including the U.S., are investing many times more per capita than Canada in industries and jobs related to the clean economy. Canada is at risk of being left behind.

Instead of pouring money into massively expanding the tar sands, let’s invest more of the wealth they and other industries are producing in solutions, such as renewable energy technologies that lessen our dependency on oil, new manufacturing processes that are cleaner and more efficient and changes to transportation systems that improve people’s lives and reduce pollution. All of these initiatives are creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs around the world and it is time that Canada had our fair share.

Rather than attacking Neil Young, the oil industry should be working to clean up its act, and our leaders should be working to transition to a modern economy powered by safe, renewable sources of energy.

Musical interlude

Delerium feat. Angela McCluskey - Stargazing

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Robert Reich (via GlenInCA) points out the connection between a strong middle class and curbs on corporate excesses - with may go a long way toward explaining why the business lobby is working so hard to eliminate the concept of a secure livelihood for most workers:

Last week’s massive toxic chemical spill into West Virginia Elk River illustrates another benefit to the business class of high unemployment, economic insecurity, and a safety-net shot through with holes. Not only are employees docile, eager to accept whatever crumbs they can get. The public is also quiescent and unwilling to cause trouble.
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For years political scientists have wondered why the citizens of West Virginia and other poorer states vote against their economic interests, hypothesizing it’s because economic issues have been preempted by others like guns, abortion, and race. But as wages keep sinking and economic security disappears, it’s also because people are so desperate for jobs they’ll vote whatever way industry wants them to. Bottom line: A strong and growing middle class is the best bulwark against corporate irresponsibility.

- And Jim Stanford wonders why the same economists looking on the bright side of a falling Canadian dollar now seem to have ignored the effects of a higher currency for the past decade.

- Bruce Cheadle reports that the Cons have been skimping on informing Canadians about health and issues - even as they've spent millions promoting nonexistent programs which involve nothing more than a giveaway to employers. 

- Kady O'Malley reports that Stephen Harper's already-sad attempt to put actual policy on hold for a gratuitous 2017 birthday bash may be running into another snag - as the country the Cons plan to celebrate bears little resemblance to Canada. And Jeremy Nuttall catches Stephen Harper trying to put one over on Vancouver's ethnic media - as the Prime Minister directly responsible for expanding and entrenching the use of temporary foreign workers pretended to disagree with his own party's policy of favouring temporary, work-based immigration in service of abusive employers over any long-term opportunity for newcomers to Canada.

- Finally, Murray Mandryk slams the Saskatchewan Party's back-benchers for gleefully voting down basic accounting principles which even their own leaders don't dare to oppose publicly.

New column day

Here, on how Mark Adler's C-520 looks to undermine public participation in all Canadian political parties - including the Conservatives who are pushing it.

I'll add here one point which didn't make it into the column. While there's obviously a need for independent institutions to act impartially, there's also a need for them to have some familiarity with the systems they're charged with overseeing. And if the Cons succeed in ensuring that regulators can't have any personal knowledge of what they're supposed to be regulating, the result may be far more damaging than the type of unsupported assertion of partisanship that's encouraged by Adler's bill.

For further reading...
- Alex Boutilier offers an introduction to the bill.
- David Doorey writes about the lack of protection for political views in many workplaces across the country.
- And Lawrence Martin worries that the effect of the bill will be entirely partisan (at least as long as the Cons remain in office).

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- John Cassidy makes the case to call the U.S.' war on poverty a success - pointing out that there has been a meaningful reduction in poverty over the past 50 years connected almost entirely to government programs. But lest that be taken as an indication that there's no need to do more, Jared Bernstein points out that if economic growth had been distributed as it was in the postwar boom, poverty would have been eradicated by the mid-1980s - rather than persisting among tens of millions of Americans today as inequality has grown.

- Which is to say there's nothing but reason for skepticism when trickle-down policies are sold as a boost for workers rather than an attack on them. And Martin Regg Cohn notes that Tim Hudak's latest message represents a particularly laughable rendition of the same old hymn.

- In contrast, Ontario's Health Providers Against Poverty suggest that a minimum wage hike to $14 could do wonders both for the working poor in particular, and social development in general.

- Josh Eidelson looks at the story behind Freedom Industries' massive West Virginia chemical spill - with a complete lack of either planning or enforced regulation featuring prominently. And Tom Warne-Smith discusses how the TPP figures to result in yet more corporate attacks on any attempt to protect the environment.

- Meanwhile, Frances Russell highlights the multiple layers of wishful thinking - involving both oil prices and the effectiveness of unproven remediation techniques - being relied on by the tar sands to shrug off environmental concerns. Don Braid questions why Alberta still hasn't put together a serious greenhouse gas emission reduction plan of its own to fill the vacuum left by the Cons. And James Munson comments on the Cons' gag order imposed on the Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industry Development as a condition of federal funding.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Cuddled cats.

Tuesday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Jo Snyder discusses how poverty makes everybody less healthy, and recognizes the need for higher basic wages as a result. And Laurie Penny highlights the futility of trying to badger young adults into service jobs which offer no opportunity for personal, professional or financial progress:

The British gov­ernment, like many others, is no longer even pretending to care about how or if the next generation gets to thrive. It is demonstrably content to sacrifice its young. That quality is not just spiteful; it is a recipe for social and cultural self-annihilation.

What are the alternatives? “Finding work” for young people, even the lowest-paid and least secure work, seems to be the only solution on the table, even from well-meaning groups such as the Prince’s Trust. The government’s sole response to the survey was that it was doing “everything possible” to help young people find work – chiefly “incentivising” them with the threat of eviction in a stagnant job market. What it is not doing is helping any young person find work that pays a liveable wage, or a wage at all – and in the meantime it’s getting harder to afford the rent and bills.

The assumption that work is a passport to dignity and security, that work is what makes life worth living, is so deeply embedded in our culture that it is almost heretical to think otherwise. But the problem isn’t just the lack of work. It’s also the lack of hope. Young people leaving school and university can no longer kid themselves that their future is likely to include a stable place to live, love and get on with growing up, even if they do manage to find paid work.

- Meanwhile, Barbara Ehrenreich offers a reminder as to the cost of trying to live with poverty. And Josh Eidelson interviews Frances Fox Piven about the connections between the Republicans' attacks on the poor and their appeals to racism.

- David Atkins points out Fintan O'Toole's commentary on the disastrous effects of corporatist policy (from deregulation to austerity) in Ireland.

- And finally, Andrew Coyne sees both Stephen Harper and Chris Christie as perfect examples of a warped political system in which political leaders are assessed largely on their ability to avoid taking responsibility for the scandals of their own hand-picked insiders:

It was all there [in Christie's press conference]: the repeated declarations that he “took responsibility” without in fact taking any; the expressions of contrition that made it clear he had nothing to be contrite about; the evocations of what a toll the whole affair had taken on him emotionally; and the almost instantaneous conversion of what ought reasonably to have been a moment for humility and introspection into yet another occasion to list off his many wonderful qualities. Change a few words here and there, and you could have been listening to the prime minister’s year-end interviews.

Indeed, the explanation both have offered is remarkably similar: My closest advisors and confidants conceived and carried out an ethically abhorrent plan, for my benefit but without my knowledge, then lied to me about it for months. Even supposing we take these at face value, it is hardly “taking responsibility” to blame it all on your staff, nor is it especially difficult to say you are “sorry” for other people’s mistakes. They are simply words politicians have been taught to say: They test well with focus groups, almost as well as “I’m not a focus-group tested politician.”
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We have been taught not to expect [genuine responsibility] from our leaders. The measure by which we assess them now is their own expedience — “what they need to do” or “what they should say,” by which we mean not what is true or right but what might work. 

But these are not simply crises to be managed. They go to the heart of each man’s claims to leadership. It is pointless to offer advice on how they should “handle” the issue, because they are the issue.

On self-interest

With Chuck Strahl's massive conflict of interest between lobbying and patronage appointments already making news, the revelation that Vic Toews has found his way into the lobbying industry (having seemingly planned for it before he'd even resigned from Parliament) looks all the more noteworthy. And Toews' assertion that a lawyer who would seem to have accumulated substantial pensions through three different public roles has "got to make a living" trading off his political connections speaks volumes about how far removed Stephen Harper and has cabinet ministers are from the reality facing most Canadians.

That said, Toews' position does seem to fit the new revolving door into the Cons' typical pattern of ethical commentary.

As with centralized control, the misuse of public money for partisan purposes and a lack of accountability, lobbying looks to be just another area where the Cons have gone out of their way to do in government what they decried in opposition. And the U.S. influence seems to be unmistakable - as Toews is fully embracing the view that a transition from public office to a lobbying role should be both common and lucrative.

But Toews' addition to the list of Cons-turned-lobbyists does raise the question of how so many members of Harper's inner circle leave public service with the apparent assumption that their lone remaining purpose is to cash in. And it's not hard to see that mindset as a continuation of the Cons' attitude that governing is solely about helping themselves rather than the country.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- The Star's editorial board sees Canada's woeful job numbers as a signal that it's time for some economic management in the interests of people (rather than artificial manipulation of numbers):

Economists used words like “dismal” and “ugly” for these results, and no wonder. Last year turned out to be the worst year for job growth in Canada since the recession of 2008-2009. And this was just the latest evidence that Canada’s recovery has stalled. The experts are even starting to speculate about a possible cut in interest rates – not the eventual increase that has been predicted for many months based on a gradual strengthening in the economy.

So what’s the Harper government’s response? Nothing. In fact, worse than nothing. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and his officials spent most of last week putting out the message that Canadians should expect a stand-pat federal budget with no significant initiatives, no surprises, no new spending and no meaningful tax breaks. In fact, sources were hinting to selected journalists that it might even be delivered the week of Feb. 10 – all the better to bury it amid the distraction of the Sochi Winter Olympics that will be in full swing then.

Flaherty’s sole obsession appears to be making sure that the government erases its deficit by its own self-imposed target of 2015-16.
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For the Harper Conservatives, it’s also nakedly political. They want to go into the 2015 election year with a big budget bang – with the deficit slain and goodies on offer for their chosen electoral constituencies. In the meantime, the unemployment lines in Ontario and elsewhere can just grow longer.

This is a dangerously complacent attitude that will leave more and more people without hope that things can get better – or even a sense that Ottawa takes their plight seriously. Ontarians, in particular, should remember that when it comes time to pass judgment on the Harper government next year.

- Michael Harris discusses Elections Canada's investigation into Julian Fantino's campaign finances. And David Climenhaga follows up on Chuck Strahl's multiple conflicts of interest - while noting that what's kept barely legal through loopholes in the Cons' system of ethics has little to do with what's right.

- Jessica Barrett reports that Lisa Raitt considers lax rail safety (and the occasional town blown to smithereens) to be more than sexy enough to be worth defending. And Tim Harper discusses why Neil Young's words (and actions) to address the tar sands deserve our attention.

- Finally, Robert Frank writes about the vicious cycle of inequality:

Income concentration has changed spending patterns in other ways that widen the income gap. The wealthy have been spending more on gifts, clothing, housing, celebrations and other things simply because they have more money. Their extra spending has shifted the frames of reference that shape demand by others just below them, so these less wealthy people have been spending more, and so on, all the way down the income ladder. But because incomes below the top have been stagnant, the resulting expenditure cascades have made it harder for middle- and low-income families to make ends meet. Despite taking on huge amounts of debt, they’ve been unable to keep pace with community standards. Interest payments impoverish them while enriching their wealthy creditors.

But perhaps the most important new feedback loop shows up in higher education. Tighter budgets in middle-class families make it harder for them to afford the special tutors and other environmental advantages that help more affluent students win admission to elite universities. Financial aid helps alleviate these problems, but the children of affluent families graduate debt-free and move quickly into top-paying jobs, while the children of other families face lesser job prospects and heavy loads of student debt. All too often, the less affluent experience the miracle of compound interest in reverse.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that to end your weekend.

- Paul Luke comments on the general stratification of workers into three groups: professionals facing extended hours and stress at a single job, service-sector workers juggling multiple jobs at more than full-time hours, and people struggling to find work at all. But it's well worth asking whether it's inevitable that we'll keep moving in a direction which seems to offer few benefits for anybody but the employers who extract more work for less pay - and asking what public policy choices we could make to ensure manageable workloads for more of the would-be workers who might want them.

- Tabatha Southey hands out her medals for climate-change denial in the wake of last week's extreme winter weather.

- Robin Rowland catches the Cons putting the National Energy Board in charge of regulating fisheries affected by pipelines - once again signalling their determination to have environmental concerns heard only by organizations whose primary concern is expanding resource extraction (if those concerns are to heard at all).

- Ezra Klein writes about the impact of partisan and ideological framing on different groups' support for exactly the same set of ideas, and wonders whether meaningful policy discussion is effectively ruled out by partisan affiliations. And Henry Farrell replies that there's value in being able to look at ideas critically based on motivated reasoning arising out of their origins - as long as the result is a meaningful evaluation of the ideas presented on all sides.

- Finally, Daniel Boffey reports on the UK's stock of publicly-constructed social housing - which, thanks to Conservative governments past and present, has largely become a source of rent revenue for the wealthy rather than an actual opportunity for people to find an affordable place to live.