Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- George Monbiot writes that rhetoric about "learning to live with it" has become the go-to excuse to allow preventable tragedies - including the COVID pandemic and the deepening climate crisis - to go unaddressed. Joe Vipond, Kashif Perzada and Malgorzata Gasperowicz argue that Albertans (like citizens elsewhere) have never given informed consent to the mass infection strategy apparently being substituted for any reasonable public health policy. And Linda Geddes reports on new research adding a massively increased risk of deep vein thrombosis and blood clots to the list of effects of infection. 

- The CCPA offers its review of Saskatchewan's provincial budget, highlighting Scott Moe's attempt to use it as to stop talking about the ongoing pandemic even as the damage wrought by COVID-19 reaches new heights. Phil Tank points out how a continued focus on (misleading nominal-dollar) comparisons to a decade and a half ago shows that the Saskatchewan Party has never grown up. And Jessie Anton reports on the students taking direct action to push for adequate education funding - rather than cuts for an already-starved public system while new money is funneled to private operators. 

- Meanwhile, the CCPA's federal budget review recognizes that some important steps toward improving people's lives are ultimately being treated as secondary to keeping the corporate sector comfortable. Mike Moffatt notes that a belated federal return to the world of making housing policy falls far short of what people need to fulfil their right to a home. And Alex Ballingall reports on the rightly frustrated response of environmental groups to a budget whose main investment in climate change is a handout to oil companies for carbon capture and storage schemes which do little to reduce emissions while locking in fossil fuel infrastructre. 

- Fatima Syed writes about the Ontario NDP's complete and ambitious climate plan in an election where the other main parties are looking to downplay the future of the planet. And Paige Bennett reports on new research from the White House Office of Management and Budget showing a multi-trillion-dollar price tag attached to climate inaction.  

- Jacob Lorinc discusses the growing recognition that corporate greed is the main driver in life becoming perpetually less affordable. 

- Finally, Lauren Pelley explains why a national pharmacare program hasn't yet been implemented despite a myriad of promises and studies - with furious lobbying by profiteers of course ranking at the top of the list.