Friday Morning Links

This and that to end your week.

- Bruce Campbell argues that Alberta should take a lesson from Norway on how to manage natural resources - and plenty of other provinces could stand to take notes as well:

The Norwegian government owns 80 per cent of petroleum production, and retains roughly 85 per cent of the net petroleum revenues mainly through a 78-per-cent company tax and through direct access mechanisms.

In Alberta and Canada, ownership and control have been controversial issues. At present, virtually the entire industry is owned by foreign and domestic private interests, which have taken the lion’s share of the petroleum wealth.

According to one estimate, the Alberta government has averaged just 9 per cent of the economic rent from the oilsands over the last 15 years, and the federal government now takes (after tax breaks) a paltry 7 per cent of oil company revenues through the general corporate income tax.

The Norwegian government has been very effective in distributing the benefits of oil wealth both regionally and throughout its population, thanks to a generous social welfare system, an equitable labour relations system and a progressive tax system. It has maintained one of the lowest levels of income inequality in the world.

Inequitable petrodollar recycling mechanisms explain, in large part, why inequality is substantially higher in Alberta than the Canadian average (which in turn is among the highest in the OECD), and why it has grown dramatically over the last decade.

- But of course, that won't be happening among the premiers more interested in serving as wholly-owned subsidiaries of oil barons than advancing any issue which might actually affect their own province.

- Thomas Walkom sees the latest set of Idle No More protests as a qualified success, while Barbara Yaffe identifies John Duncan and the Cons' handling of First Nation issued as an unmitigated failure. And Emma Teitel introduces some new language to discuss the reflexive anti-activist tendency of some columnists - though I think we may be best off contrasting "idle no more" against "curmudgeonly forever".

- Finally, Chris Sorenson and Charlie Gillis discuss the new underclass of young Canadians - as plenty of citizens who took exactly the path suggested for them (featuring higher education at ballooning prices) are now stuck with few job prospects.

Friday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to end your week.

- Tim Harper suggests that the Cons are running out of options to try to push the Gateway pipeline on a thoroughly-opposed public in British Columbia. But in keeping with the Cons' general view of the world as nothing but a public relations problem to be shouted down for financial gain, James Moore and Gwyn Morgan are sure they have the answer: more high-priced spin from Enbridge and other tar-sands operators. And pogge rightly notes that part of the anti-environment strategy figures to include an effort to paint all environmental activism and advocacy as "terrorism".

- Carol Goar comments on the continuing efforts of Canadian doctors to save health care for refugees from the Cons' cuts:

Rashid, a family physician, is one of the founders of Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care, which has vowed to track and report cases of death or serious harm resulting from Kenney’s $20-million-a-year cutback.

It took effect a month ago. But reports already are coming in: a 7-year-old epileptic boy in Hamilton was hospitalized for a severe seizure because he could not get medicine; a woman who had endured multiple rapes after she was sold into the sex trade couldn’t get an ultrasound for the fetus she was carrying; a Colombian man is desperately fundraising to pay Toronto General Hospital for life-saving abdominal surgery; two refugee claimants in Ottawa — one Peruvian, the other El Salvadoran — have stopped taking their post-traumatic stress medications.

By fall, the doctors hope to have a compendium of cases from across the country. A local delegation of medical workers will show up every time a cabinet minister makes an announcement, the government calls a news conference or Parliament holds public hearings to highlight specific cases. “None of us wants to disrupt meetings, but we really feel we have no choice,” said Tim O’Shea of McMaster University, who works as a medical consultant at the Shelter Health Network in Hamilton.

Since April, the doctors have been asking Kenney for a meeting on this issue. So far he has refused.

- Meanwhile, the Star rightly points out that the Cons' thoroughly-discredited finger-pointing over Attawapiskat did nothing to help the underlying housing crisis.

- Finally, the Star-Phoenix weighs in on the need for some answers about Robocon:

It is rare for Elections Canada officials to speak out about investigations before they are concluded, and the agency receives dozens of complaints after every election. Often it takes years to clear these files.

But the allegations that voters in some ridings received socalled robocalls misdirecting them to wrong voter stations, or calls from people alleging to be from particular parties who acted in an obnoxious or insulting manner in an apparent attempt to discourage their votes, is a little more serious than candidates complaining their signs have been defaced.

If these allegations are true, it strikes to the heart of Canada's electoral system. For a democratic system to function properly the electoral process must be considered trustworthy. And for a democratic government to rule with authority, the public must have confidence it legitimately came to power.

Saturday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- Trish Hennessy points out that Rob Ford's contemptuous attack on the idea of secure employment may offer an ideal contrast between the right-wing view of the economy and the stability citizens actually want for themselves:

Remember when holding down a job for life was considered a sign of personal responsibility and integrity?

Remember when staying committed to a job for life was an example of how you could be relied upon, trusted? How you were viewed as stable and productive?

Remember when having a job for life was a symbol of the model citizen? A good family person? A way to contribute to our collective well-being?

And remember when the pot of gold at the end of that job-for-life rainbow was a company pension that turned retirement into “the golden years”?

A job for life. A frame worth propagating?

- Meanwhile, Karen Foster points out the disturbingly high number of workers stuck with "involuntary" part-time work due to a lack of full-time jobs.

- Rick Salutin discusses how readily-available online communications can serve as a democratizing force:

The models for major change over the past two centuries were Revolution versus Reform. Either overthrow and destroy what was in place — the ancien regime, capitalism etc. — replacing them with something new. Or reform those institutions, nibbling away at them till you’ve gradually reconstructed them. You see the mindset persisting in education: either get rid of schools as they are and replace them with free schools, home schooling and the like — or reform what’s there until it vanishes.

But tweet night did neither. It left all the appalling old structures exactly as they were: the podium, the stodgy agenda (presentation followed by Q and A). Yet it remade them simply by inserting a layer: the Internet. Nothing changed but everything was different due to that insertion. It’s radical, in the sense of transformative, yet conservative, in the sense of preservative. And it worked.

- Jorge Barrera breaks the story that the Cons tried to destroy records documenting their deliberate choice not to talk about John Duncan's callous view of residential schools.

- Finally, Erin points out that the Wall government seems to be curiously silent about BHP Billiton's plans to undermine Canpotex now that there aren't obvious political points to be scored.

So that's the trick

Apparently it took a community housing crisis for the Cons to finally commit to...building a school which Attawapiskat has desperately needed for years.

Which means that the housing problem too might be solved eventually - just as long as there's another even larger and more immediate disaster that the Cons are trying to paper over.

Update: Though as Dr. Dawg notes, the Cons have promised the school before - only to fail to follow through once the heat was off.

Truly scandalous

Paul Wells is right to note where the more fundamental scandal lies in the Cons' handling of the desperate need to make clean water available to Canada's First Nations. But it's well worth noting that there's a more recent set of equally problematic developments, as hinted at by the Globe and Mail's coverage:

First nations leaders were allegedly being warned by the promoters of the H2O Pro system that new legislation before the Senate will require them to meet stringent drinking water standards but will provide no resources to do so.

Lest there be any doubt, that message wasn't simply a matter of the system's promoters making something up that wasn't already known to the First Nations involved. In fact, Shawn Atleo raised exactly the same criticism of the bill at the time - so it's only the failings of the Harper Cons to back up new rules with matching resources that made the pitch even remotely plausible.

Which leads to this...

The communities were allegedly told that government connections could be used to find money for the equipment and training if they purchased the systems.

And that's where the Carson scandal most clearly highlights the ultimate problem with the Harper government.

If the party in charge of allocating funding hadn't spent the last five years looking for more and more blatant ways to direct public funds for political benefit, or if anybody bought that the Cons would deal with anybody honestly or transparently, then a sales pitch based solely on political connections rather than merit would have been laughed out of the communities involved and immediately exposed. But given the Cons' actions while in office, the concept looks to have been taken fairly seriously - and until APTN broke the story nationally, the communities themselves seem to have been scared enough of reprisals to avoid saying anything publicly.

So the real problem underlying the Carson story is that the Harper Cons have been so thoroughly unresponsive to First Nation needs as to create the opportunity for Carson - and so thoroughly motivated by politics in doling out benefits that nobody seems to have entirely doubted the claim that privileged access to public money might be available if the right people were able to take a cut. And the fact that this particular scheme was eventually sniffed out (with no substantial help from the Harper government) doesn't mean anybody else has reason to think otherwise.

Speak no evil

Just so we're clear, Bruce Carson, as a prominent former member of Stephen Harper's inner circle, lobbied Harper government officials well within the period in which he was prohibited from doing so. And the Harper Cons reported and did absolutely nothing until the media broke the story months later.

We'll have to see whether more cases turn up, particularly now that someone as prominent as Carson has turned up in a reported incident. But for all the Cons' tough talk on lobbying, Carson's case strongly suggests that their attitude toward lobbying (as with any other way of skirting the rules for the benefit of their friends and cronies) is to encourage it until somebody else stops them.

Compare and contrast

It's great to see the Star reporting on the latest invasion of the Cons' Pod People. But there's another interesting new piece of information from the story which nicely highlights the relative priorities of the NDP's MPs compared to those of the Cons.

Remember that when Con MP John Duncan received an e-mail which wasn't intended for him, the result was his party surrepetitously dialling into and then leaking a private telephone call for political gain.

In contrast, the Star reveals that when NDP MP Linda Duncan received an e-mail which wasn't intended for her, the result was...the newfound knowledge being used to help her constituents:

In Edmonton-Strathcona, the only Alberta riding the Conservatives do not hold, local Tory candidate Ryan Hastman has participated in at least five government announcements over the past few months, while the local NDP MP, Linda Duncan, says she has been excluded from all of them. Hastman boasts of his participation in pictures on his Facebook page.

Duncan, who calls the "whole process offensive," says it becomes doubly irritating when a Conservative candidate claims credit for funds she helped to get for the community, as the duly elected MP.

"What I find reprehensible about all this is that they just can't seem to accept the fact that Edmonton-Strathcona voters elected me, not a Conservative," Duncan said.

Hastman was on hand, posing for pictures with Labour Minister Rona Ambrose, when the Conservatives gave a $14.8 million cheque to the GO community sports centre in Edmonton in September, for example.

Duncan had worked with the centre to get the application into the government before the deadline elapsed earlier in the year – and says she only found out about that deadline because someone accidentally sent her an email directed to the Alberta Conservative caucus.

Now, there's plenty of reason for concern about how the Cons themselves apparently tried to keep the funding deadlines to themselves. (And it's probably worth some followup as to whether that might help to explain the glaring gap between stimulus funding for Con-held ridings and that for the rest of the country.)

But Linda Duncan's response also highlights the fact that there are indeed MPs to be found whose main focus is working to serve their constituents rather than taking credit for what others are doing. And the fact that Duncan's main challenger has that set of priorities exactly backwards should give Edmonton-Strathcona voters ample reason to keep Duncan in Parliament.

Update: And lest I forget, you too can help out the cause.

Action and reaction

The Cons' unauthorized recording of an NDP caucus meeting may have taken a back seat to Harper's prorogation crisis last month. But it's good to see that the NDP is keeping the issue alive - and the latest reports may only hint at what's coming:

The NDP wants the names of "any and all individuals" involved in the Conservative decision to record and distribute copies of a New Democrat caucus meeting – and it is threatening legal action to get them.

A letter from NDP counsel presses the Conservatives for the information and strongly suggests litigation will follow unless the names are forthcoming.

"Our client will, if necessary, take appropriate measures to protect its interests," says the Dec. 23 letter from lawyer Steven Barrett to Arthur Hamilton, counsel retained by the Conservatives...

The letter from Barrett reveals a Dec. 3 conversation in which Hamilton is said to have told him the Conservatives would stop publicly referring to the recording, and that they were prepared to address NDP concerns.

The letter also notes the NDP's demand for the names of everyone who participated in the recording and distribution of the tape, as well as those involved in the decision.

"Please let us know how you would like this matter to unfold and provide us with the information we have been waiting for, or in the alternative, confirm that you are authorized to accept service on behalf of the Conservative Party of Canada and its various members and employees of any legal proceedings my client may initiate."

Now, it's worth noting that the above paragraphs - especially the last one - suggest that the NDP is doing far more than simply maneuvering to get the names of the Cons involved. Indeed, any attempt to get the names now looks to be merely a means of setting a broader litigation process in motion to claim damages from the Cons for their wrongful taping and distribution.

At this point, the only apparent obstacle to the NDP issuing a claim is that aside from John Duncan's role, it doesn't know for certain who bears responsibility for what.

There are a few ways around that problem. The apparent preferred option is to have the Cons supply that information, which would make it a relatively simple matter to include the relevant names within the original claim and serve it personally on the Cons involved.

Of course, the Cons don't figure to be eager to cooperate, as the list of names and descriptions of actions would have obvious political implications. But there is another equally viable option alluded to in Barrett's letter.

Some of the defendants can be identified only by their actions for now rather than names, so long as the NDP can show that the claim was properly served on those affected. Which is where the request to have Hamilton accept service on behalf of all Con members and employees becomes significant: if he agrees, then the NDP won't need to worry about the names for now, and can fill in the blanks based on information which the Cons would be required to provide as the litigation proceeds.

If the Cons aren't willing to cooperate even to that extent, then the final recourse would be to seek a court's approval to serve the unnamed defendants through another means. I'd have to think the Cons would think twice about going down that route, since the NDP could frame a request to involve putting public notices in newspapers about the Cons' wrongdoing at their own expense. But if the Cons are determined to obstruct as much as possible, that would be the fallback option.

Again, the important point is that the NDP looks to have everything in place for a claim against the Cons except a means of determining who it needs to serve and how. And the fact that the Cons have already tried to "address NDP concerns" in a likely attempt to minimize the eventual damages suggests that they fully expect the end result to be in the NDP's favour - meaning that there's every reason to look forward to what will happen with the claim.