Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Linda McQuaig writes about the fallout from the ideology of constant privatization - and a precedent from Canada's past as to how public institutions can meet essential social purposes:

C. D. Howe was a towering figure during the war, and he has been credited with transforming Canada from a largely agriculture-based society to an industrial one. His legacy lives on today – somewhat ironically – through the C.D. Howe Institute, a business-funded think tank that has consistently promoted pro-market ideas. While Howe shared these ideas, it was actually his development of Canada’s wartime Crown corporations with their substantial manufacturing capabilities that laid the foundation for Canada’s evolution into a modern industrial nation. Once the war was over, Howe reverted to his conventional pro-market views, pushing for privatization rather than envisioning a future for the promising public enterprises he had built.

Many decades later, we are now faced with an urgent need to evolve beyond a modern industrial nation, powered by fossil fuels.

An enormous mobilization, on a scale similar to the one orchestrated by C.D. Howe, will be essential to fundamentally redesign our economy and society for the global green energy revolution. Indeed, given the urgency of the task if we are to avert climate disaster, it’s clear that a massive campaign of government planning, oversight and ownership – along the lines of what was achieved during the war through government planning and Crown corporations – will be needed.

Once again, the task is too big and too important to be left to the private marketplace.

- And Marie Aspiazu notes that Canada's corporate telecom oligopoly is looking to ensure that the price of access to the Internet doesn't get any more affordable. 

- Alex Hemingway points out how unduly low property taxes in Vancouver lead to inequality and speculation, while depriving the city of money to provide needed services.  

- Bob Barnetson discusses how the Kenney UCP is stripping nearly all labour and employment rights from farm workers. And Brennan Doherty reports on the expectation that rail workers will function under a state of fatigue.

- Finally, Jordan Gill talks to Theresa McClenaghan about the reasons why smaller nuclear power is merely a distraction rather than an answer to our energy and environmental needs. And Jim Green's earlier post on the subject is well worth a read.