Thursday, April 12, 2012

Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Lawrence Martin comments on the growing resonance of inequality as an issue for Canadian voters. But the most telling sign may be less the Ontario NDP's steps to highlight the need for more progressive taxation (as Martin recognizes), but the McGuinty Libs' response - which in rebuffing the NDP's proposed social spending rather than the tax measures seems to signal that even one of the parties which has contributed so much to growing inequality doesn't want to be caught supporting it.

- David Macdonald contrasts two decades of perpetually-growing personal debt for individual Canadians against the pattern of corporate cash hoarding (even as the business sector has been handed billions upon billions of free dollars based on the assurance it'll invest in the economy).

- James Munson duly rebuts the Con's attempts to take credit for greenhouse gas emission reductions caused by provincial policies. Meanwhile, the David Suzuki Foundation calls out Saskatchewan as one of the worst provincial laggards, and the province's response only confirms the lack of interest in taking climate change seriously:
Saskatchewan, meanwhile, has the highest greenhouse-gas emissions per capita in the country, has no plan to close its coal-fired power plants and has eliminated its Climate Change Secretariat and its Office of Energy Consumption. “It is difficult to imagine any jurisdiction taking the threats of climate change less seriously than Saskatchewan currently does,” the Suzuki report says. Saskatchewan officials did not respond to a request for comment.
- Andrew Coyne sees the F-35 fiasco as a litmus test as to how Canadians will react to being deliberately and blatantly lied to by the Harper Cons.

- Finally, I'll offer a reminder that Sunday is the deadline for first-phase submissions to Saskatchewan's Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission. (For those interested, other deadlines apply elsewhere - see here for more information by province.)

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