Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your afternoon reading.

- pogge rightly questions the Cons' continued efforts to have decisions made by ministerial fiat rather than through public debate.

- Glen McGregor eviscerates Brian Lilley's thoroughly inaccurate attack on Canada's Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand.

- Murray Mandryk suggests that Saskatchewan's New Democratic Party needs to remove the "democratic" part of its identity in choosing a new leader. But I'm not sure how the concept of a top-down "leadership vetting process" is supposed to be seen as an improvement from a vote among members, especially as a response to a leadership campaign where the establishment favourite was able to clear the field in large part thanks to the impression of impenetrable institutional support.

- Finally, in the good news department, CBC reports that at least one person who arrived at Occupy Saskatoon mostly out of a need for temporary housing found along the way that it's worth working for the group's cause of greater equality.

Death to diplomacy!

I'll give Sun Media this much: they're being slightly less partisan than I'd have expected in their bombast, following up their demand to fire a diplomat for the crime of following the alphabet with Brian Lilley's equally vituperative screed against an acknowledgment of historical fact by the president of the Conservative Party.

But I'm rather curious how a media service expects to survive trying to fabricate a scandal out of every instance of civil behaviour toward somebody who's seen as unpopular. And indeed, I have to wonder whether anybody trying to meet that remarkable standard would want to steer clear of Sun itself.

Wednesday Morning Links

Assorted material for your mid-week reading.

- The Globe and Mail is the latest source to analyze whether corporate tax cuts have produced the promised returns over the past decade. And the result should come as no surprise:

(A)n analysis of Statistics Canada figures by The Globe and Mail reveals that the rate of investment in machinery and equipment has declined in lockstep with falling corporate tax rates over the past decade. At the same time, the analysis shows, businesses have added $83-billion to their cash reserves since the onset of the recession in 2008.
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In 2000, the combined federal-provincial tax rate was just over 42 per cent, ranking Canada near the top among industrialized nations. The combined rate has since fallen to 28 per cent, placing the country in the middle of the pack, and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s goal is to reduce it to 25 per cent by fiscal 2013.

Businesses were widely expected to use the extra money from successive rounds of tax cuts to build factories and offices and buy new machinery and equipment. At one time, they did just that. From 1960 until the early 1990s, corporations invested almost every penny of their after-tax cash flow back into the business.

But the tax cuts appear to have reversed decades of tradition. Investment in equipment and machinery has fallen to 5.5 per cent in 2010 as a share of Canada’s total economic output from 6.8 per cent in 2005 and 7.7 per cent in 2000, The Globe analysis shows.

- Which explains why Marc Lee's call for some Robin Hood tax policy figures to be just as beneficial on the economic front as the social one:

Unemployment is still just under 8%, which is good compared to the double-digit unemployment of the early 1990s, but not great compared to the expansions of the late 1990s and 2000s. Too much of the employment gains that have come are in part-time jobs, so added to the 1.5 million unemployed are another half-million or so who are under-employed.

That is not good for businesses in Canada. Nor is the fact that one-third of the gains in income over the past decade have gone to the top 1% of households. The super-rich use this income as a means of keeping score, but it is not spent in the real economy. Canada’s wealthiest could have $100,000 fall out of the trunk of their Porches and not even notice. Yet, further down the income ladder, we see record levels of household debt that are contraining spending.

Again, not good for business. A good business climate is one in which demand is strong, where people have good incomes are spending them on good(s) and services...

(A) little Robin Hood in our economic planning would do a lot of good, and as the economy rises so the deficit would fall. Adding in some new tax brackets for very high incomes, as the AFB has recommended, would be even better. Remember that corporate income tax cuts are tax cuts for the richest Canadians. Our economic policies should be judged by whether they increase inequality or not. We know that lower levels of inequality are better not just in stronger demand, but also in terms of broader health and social outcomes. A simple test: does this policy further enrich the already wealthy? If so, it must be rejected.

- Meanwhile, the Cons' caricature of a threat to the economy is no more accurate than their spin as to what's supposed to improve it:

Contrary to federal election campaign rhetoric, neither a minority nor coalition government would necessarily be a detriment to the Canadian economy, economists and political science experts say.

In fact, many argue that deficit reduction will have more lasting impact on the economy that than corporate tax cuts and other short-term spending decisions.
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“No matter who is in power we feel there is a consensus in Canada among the major political parties that deficit reduction is desirable. For us the bottom line is that reduction and elimination of the deficit over the next several years will be the goal of no matter which government is there.”

Federal debt ballooned to nearly 70 per cent of GDP. But that fell to 29 per cent by the end of 2008. It currently stands at about 34 per cent.

Any new budget introduced after the election is likely to show a similar path toward eliminating the budget deficit by 2016, which would be positive for the country’s credit rating, according to Moody’s.

- For those wondering whose side is worth listening to in Fox News North's latest attempt to pick a fight with a more reputable news source, Andrew Potter provides the quote of the day:

It’s amazing what sort of character assassination you can get away through chickenshit use of question marks (in Levant’s case). Or in Lilley’s case, through the deliberate withholding of facts. As Peter Loewen himself told Lilley when Lilley interviewed him for his March 31 story, Loewen did the same sort of work for Harper in 2004 that he later did for Ignatieff. Loewen was also a staffer for a Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative leadership candidate in 2005. And he once donated money to Pierre Poilievre’s nomination campaign.

This information was available to Brian Lilley, his editor, and to Ezra Levant. It is thoroughly despicable that it was not included in the stories that were published. What is going on here? In yesterday’s Globe and Mail, Simon Houpt suggests that Loewen just got caught up in a broader anti-CBC campaign by Sun Media, as it prepares to launch its new television station.

If so, that’s disgraceful enough. But I actually think something more basic is at work here: Intellectual prostitutes like Brian Lilley and Ezra Levant are so used to selling their brains on the cheap in journalism’s back alleys, they find it literally incredible that everyone else’s intellect is not similarly for sale.

- And finally, Dan Gardner reminds us how we got into a federal election campaign, and why the Cons' contempt of Parliament matters.

Deep thought

Lucky for Brian Lilley his spin doesn't have to meet the standards of accuracy and accountability he's so eager to use as weapons against the CBC.

The future of hackery

Shorter Brian Lilley:

What kind of two-bit, credibility-free news outlet has the nerve to take a politician's actual words out of context when it's so much easier to just make something up out of thin air?

Burning question

David Akin and Brian Lilley are leading the Sun Media Party's attacks on the NDP for suggesting that truth in broadcasting might matter.

But since they're the ones defending a change to the status quo, I'd think the onus is on them to let us know why. So exactly what falsehoods do they want to broadcast under the new rules that they can't get away with now?

Burning question

James Moore takes Brian Lilley's invitation to bash the CBC:

"While I won't comment on the matter that is before the courts,” Heritage Minister James Moore told QMI, “I will say that under our Government, over 70 institutions are now accountable for the first time under the Access to Information Act, including the CBC. We expect the CBC to respect our Access to Information laws and answer requests responsibly and quickly."

Which raises the obvious question: did Moore manage to keep a straight face while saying it?

Royally skewed

Kady has pointed out the more familiar piece of skewed messaging in Brian Lilley's post on the next Durban conference.

But I'd think the more striking line from Lilley is "princes of the foreign affairs department", which looks to be breaking new ground in building up a false perception of elitism among civil servants (who of course aren't allowed to defend themselves against the charge). And considering how hard Lilley is working to repeat his apparent talking points at every opportunity (note that both "Fort Pearson" and "latte" appear twice in the same brief post), I'm sure we can look forward to a regular diet of QMI stories about how poor, powerless little Stephen Harper, with his mere hundreds of millions of dollars in publicly-funded communication money, faces insurmountable odds in facing down the evil and all-controlling Masters of the Universe at Service Canada.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday...

- While I certainly won't agree with the more pointed attacks on the Greens' proposal to ban political TV ads, I'll raise the same point I did when it came to ten-per-centers. With the Cons firmly in control of so many advertising and communication resources, does it really make sense to cut into any of the few media where the opposition parties have any hope of getting their message out?

- Meanwhile, for those looking for useful communications tools, NUPGE's All Together Now site has some handy message suggestions. (Though hopefully it'll evolve to include a full set of value-based words and phrases for use other contexts in addition to the current one-liners.)

- Paul Krugman is all too right in highlighting a comment as to exactly what it is that the markets want. But while the idea might well make for a low-cost way of appeasing the financial sector as it stands, shouldn't it also serve as reason to question whether the market actually is always right?

- I suppose it's for the best that Brian Lilley is willing to report the obvious from Kevin Page. But does it really take the Parliamentary Budget Officer's intervention to get a QMI reporter to acknowledge that tax cuts mean less government revenue?

- Finally, get your popcorn ready: KAIROS isn't taking its funding cuts lying down, and the Cons' response should make for some quality entertainment.

A recipe for corruption

Apparently Brian Lilley couldn't stop at just one misleading report on political funding in Canada. But let's answer his followup piece by noting that the problems with a system reliant on small individual donations should be obvious based on other stories currently making headlines.

For all the Cons' attempts to pretend that tinkering with the contribution limit somehow limits the ability of individuals to influence a governing party, the reality is that while individual limits do serve to change the type of action which is most likely to get a party's attention, they don't entirely eliminate the dangers of parties becoming indebted to individual providers of funds.

Yes, it's for the best that a wealthy individual can't cut a six-figure cheque in exchange for favours from the governing party. But that doesn't mean a well-connected bagman can't accomplish effectively the same task by putting together a fund-raiser which directs a similar amount of money to a party.

Moreover, to the extent other forms of fund-raising are limited by law, a skilled bundler will have a disproportionate amount of influence over a party. So the oft-repeated demand to make a tradeoff between cutting off public financing and raising individual contribution limits may only ensure that bagmen hold all the more influence on the political scene - both by increasing the amount one fund-raiser can direct toward a party's coffers based on the same number of wealthy friends, and by eliminating a party's other options to keep the lights on.

Which is exactly why public financing based on votes or other factors not linked to donor wealth makes for a system that's both cleaner and more fair.

Now, I'd certainly be open to ideas as to how to avoid having that serve as a source of disconnection and inertia (perhaps by linking funding not only to the votes from an election that took place up to four years in the past, but also to ongoing shows of support?). But the advantages of public funding in freeing parties from at least some of the influence of both donors and bundlers need to be kept in mind - particularly with the Cons offering a case in point as to the type of influence that will only be amplified if per-vote funding gets slashed.

(Edit: fixed typo.)

Missing perspective

Brian Lilley is proving himself a committed Con soldier both in trying to build outrage over political party funding, and in pointing to the per-vote subsidy as the only part of the scheme that might be changed. But his most obvious source of distortion is this:

Nearly $8 million dollars each year is spent on “research bureaus” to which each party represented in Parliament is entitled. Yet despite their name, people familiar with the operations of these offices admit most of the time, their activities are not the type of research activities Canadians would expect.

“They read through books and speeches on the opposition, pull quotes from newspaper stories, build websites to attack each other and spin the media,” said one source who has worked in one research bureau.

Which raises a couple of obvious questions. First, how much money is spent in PMO and departmental budgets to do exactly the same thing on behalf of the government? And shouldn't that be the area most ripe for cuts based on waste and duplication given that the Cons have their own party resources that they can rely on as well?

Friday Morning Links

Some light reading to end your work week...

- Andrew Potter highlights the obvious response to the Cons' determination to eliminate reasoned discussion by focusing on gut-level politics instead:

(T)he ultimately more effective instrument is the control of language itself. The Tories have spent the past year rolling out a few slogans, most of them aimed at framing the terms of debate for the next election. And so we’ve heard the Prime Minister repeatedly tell us that “losers don’t get to form governments,” that the Liberals will form a coalition with “socialists and separatists,” and, now, that anyone who supports the long-gun registry is a member of an urban elite. It’s a straight-up appeal to the gut, aimed at short-circuiting more sophisticated thinking.

As the Tories’ resilience at the polls suggests, gut-level politics is incredibly effective, which is why George Lakoff suggested that the only real option for the Democrats would be to engage to Republicans on their own terms—take back the White House by taking back the dictionary. It is increasingly clear that you can’t win in modern politics by having evidence or good ideas on your side, and so it might be time for the opposition in Canada to take their cue from the Democrats down south, start fighting the Tories on their own turf. For example, Stéphane Dion would have had an easier time selling his Green Shift plan if the phrase “tax bads, not goods” had even once passed his lips. More radically, the opposition might want to try reframing the anti-gun registry crowd as the “death lobby.”

- I've spent plenty of time discussing the "coalition" angle on the Cons' scare tactics. Now, Chris Selley takes on the "separatist" side and finds it equally unreasonable:

It’s often said that until Quebecers decide they want to participate in the governance of Canada — i.e., by voting Liberal, Conservative or NDP — we’ll just have to live with the appalling consequences of officially separatist MPs infesting the House of Commons. I have no time for the argument. The Quebecers who don’t want to participate in federal governance don’t vote in federal elections. If we were willing to swallow our dusty, antiquated hardcore federalist pride, we could make the system work better — which is to say, as it’s supposed to work — right now.

Never mind the fact the Bloc’s MPs often seem more honestly concerned for Canadian democracy than the other parties‚ (even if they’re only concerned insofar as it benefits Quebec). The Canadian Alliance was perfectly willing to negotiate with the Bloc in 2000 if the Liberals hadn’t won their third consecutive majority. In 2006 the House of Commons voted 266 to 16 to declare that les Québécois “form a nation within a united Canada.” On Wednesday night, the House went further — voting unanimously to censure Maclean’s magazine for having “denigrate[d] the Quebec nation” (my emphasis). The federalist high road was demolished years ago. The October Crisis was four decades ago. As Mme. Jean’s tenure as governor-general proves yet again, the federalist/separatist divide is not nearly as wide or as bitter as politicians like us to think. There’s no point continuing the charade.

- Eric Reguly comments on the wider implications of BHP Billiton's bid for PCS:

So should the Canadian government prevent BHP from scooping Potash Corp. into its voracious maw? Ignoring the fact that potash is a strategic, irreplaceable resource that prevents mass starvation, why should Canada allow companies that are actually or effectively takeover-proof to buy homegrown corporate hotties?
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Most subsidiaries, regardless or their size, have no say in the company’s important financial, legal, human resources and financing decisions. That, in turn, means that the spinoff benefits, such as the use of local lenders, legal teams and the like, are nil to negative. Tax, or lack thereof, is another big consideration. Typically, foreign buyers load up their new foreign subsidiaries with debt, all the better to minimize the local tax hit. Is that what BHP has in mind for Potash Corp.? If Investment Canada isn’t asking that question, there’s something wrong. If it isn’t legally allowed to ask that question, there’s something even more wrong.

BHP may be a fine owner of Potash Corp. Then again, it may not. If Investment Canada won’t block the takeover of a company that doesn’t need taking over, it has to ensure “net benefit” means as much. BHP can afford to deliver what the agency demands. It’s just that its demands for the last quarter century have been laughable. As a result, Canada is turning into a branch plant, A Mari usque ad Mare.

- Finally, it's well worth highlighting the Harper Cons' hiring of more and more executive staff even as they tell everybody else in the country to cut back. But can somebody ask Brian Lilley to either explain the building management implications of hiring increased numbers of "guys in the corner offices", or use language that actually describes the executive's function rather than burying the facts under a pile of inaccurate descriptions?

Meanwhile...

...I can only conclude that Brian Lilley's Fraser Institute contacts just missed his call when he went trolling for government-bashing quotes to fill an article whipped up in a span of 15 minutes. Because how else can one explain the omission of Canada's leading market dogmatists from a piece so obviously devoted to preaching their gospel unquestioned?

Today in shoddy journalism

With the federal government doing everything in its power to prevent any global agreement on climate change and Alberta's provincial government trying to claim even that course of action doesn't do enough to favour the tar sands, it takes a remarkable amount of confusion and spin to pretend that one or both is somehow failing to be enough of a cheerleader for the oil industry. Which naturally leads us to the National Post:

Now, the findings of an Angus Reid Public Opinion survey of 810 Albertans show 50% of respondents are dissatisfied with the way the provincial government acted to deal with recent criticism of the oilsands. Only 35% of those polled were satisfied and 15% were not sure.

Albertans were similarly unimpressed with the federal government, with 49% dissatisfied with how Ottawa dealt with the same criticism. Thirty-four per cent of respondents were satisfied with Ottawa's actions, while 17% were not sure.

"It's clear that there's a fury in the land in the sense that people are using the oilsands as a whipping boy for climate change -- and people in Alberta don't like it," said Mario Canseco with pollster Angus Reid. "This definitely shows that this is something the two levels [of government] need to take into account."

Of course, anybody looking at the poll seeking anything other than an excuse to declare that an Alberta separation movement is imminent would note that there's more than one way to be dissatisfied with the response of a particular government.

Indeed, nearly all of the criticism leveled at both Harper and Stelmach on a national scale has been based on their insistence on favouring the tar sands at the expense of the economy of the rest of Canada. (After all, it's Ontario and Quebec which simply want all emissions to be treated equally, and the oil industry backed by the Alberta and federal governments who want tar-sands emissions to be treated more generously.)

Which likely explains why the poll was worded the way it was. If any option had been included to distinguish between dissatisfaction based on a government's being insufficiently loud in spouting pro-oil talking points and frustration based on a government unduly favouring the tar sands over other industries, then there would be no way to conflate the two in reporting on the poll's outcome.

But as it is, the pollster and the National Post lump both together and count them as being on the side of the oil industry. Which may produce the spin they're looking for out of the story - but signals that they don't recognize any prospect of winning even Alberta's public opinion in a fair fight.

Meanwhile, Brian Lilley's take on the Cons' attack on KAIROS manages to include a remarkable set of ever-shifting goalposts. Here's Lilley on why nobody should think the Cons' decision to publicly brag about "de-funding" the organization actually relates to Jason Kenney's public explanation:

(KAIROS), which has received funding for years from CIDA, was turned down on a request for government funding of a four-year project. They did not lose core funding that has put them on the brink of bankruptcy or closing up shop as the NDP claimed, they simply were turned down on a project proposal, this is something many groups, businesses, consultants face everyday. The difference here is that Kairos is able to mount a public relations campaign using all three opposition parties and a willing media to try and get back funding they never lost.
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So why was Kairos turned down for funding?

Despite the attempts to turn this into another proxy war over the Middle East and Canada’s policy there, it is most likely that Kairos lost its funding because they didn’t fit the goals the government laid out. There is no entitlement to funding. Kairos made a pitch and they were turned down.

Now, this would make for a relatively reasonable and coherent defence if left on its own. But Lilley immediately shifts to contradicting his own point, making clear that as far as he's concerned, the Cons are fully entitled to shun KAIROS or any other group for failing to agree with their ideology:

Consider also that this is an old-fashioned left wing group, supportive of Marxist ideas like Liberation Theology, asking a Conservative government to fund it.

When the Harper government sought out a free-trade agreement with Columbia (sic), Kairos was there, with government money, to oppose it. Kairos sees plenty to be concerned about when it comes to human rights in Columbia (sic) and wants the Harper government to shun that country. Venezuela on the other hand is seen in a positive light. The message from Kairos, engagement is appropriate when a shady country is run by socialists, anything to the right deserves to be shunned.

Remember that just a few paragraphs earlier, Lilley went out of his way to point out that KAIROS received public funding only for specific projects, not for general operations. Which makes it downright stunning that he then chooses to assume without a shred of apparent evidence that it used "government money" in its efforts to protect human rights in Colombia.

Moreover, even if previous funding had been used for means which the Cons didn't like, any future funding agreement could easily be directed toward the parts of KAIROS' mandate which even the Cons couldn't find objectionable. And one would fully expect that to have happened if the federal government was interested in ensuring that a well-established aid organization was able to continue doing good work - rather than looking for an enemy to attack for political purposes.

So what is it that links the two above stories? In effect, they seem to me to signal that far too much of the Canadian media is going down the same path as the Harper government: focused solely on talking points which serve conservative causes even at the expense of accuracy or internal logic. And the less that type of mindset gets challenged either in the media or in politics, the easier it'll be for the likes of Harper to keep pushing it on a country which deserves better.