Friday Morning Links

This and that to end your week...

- Have no fear, members of the far right: of course the Harper Cons don't mean it when they sign an environmental protection agreement. Or pretend to disagree with foreign dictators. Or claim they didn't pressure the civil service to rebrand the country with their leader's name.

- And with that Con track record of dishonesty, no wonder Canada's non-profit sector is running far, far away from any association with Harper and company.

- Meanwhile, how can anybody doubt that it's perfectly normal for government ministers to conduct official business under an alias to avoid detection? Just ask that titan of modern governance, Hugh Jass.

- Finally, Carol Goar highlights the plague of prisons the Cons are so eager to inflict on the country:

What makes Drucker’s book compelling is not the statistics he presents; most of them are well known. It is the way he traces the explosion of America’s prison population back to one politician’s gut-driven policies and the way he uses his skills as a clinical psychologist to track the consequences on the streets of Harlem and the South Bronx.

Drucker wrote his analysis as a wake-up call to his fellow Americans, not as a warning to Canada. But it offers readers on this side of the border a foretaste of what lies ahead if Harper ignores the advice of everyone from health-care professionals to toppled media magnate Conrad Black, who has seen the American justice system from the inside.

Assuming the Prime Minister goes ahead, here is what Canadians can expect:
• An exponential growth in prisons. The Conservatives have refused to provide taxpayers with a credible estimate of how much they plan to spend on penitentiaries. It won’t be as costly as the American crackdown, which threatens to bankrupt several states, but the bills will keep mounting long after Harper’s departure.
• A deterioration of the social structures that communities need to prevent crime.
• A disproportionate increase in the number of poor, non-white people behind bars.
• A belated recognition that there was never any evidence tougher sentences improve public safety.
• And over time, a made-in-Ottawa “plague of prisons.”

Is this the legacy we want for our children? Is it the future we want for Canada?

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted material for your weekend reading.

- Stephen Harper's closest confidants say he'll veer right if he gets the chance with a majority. But it's of course beyond the pale for anybody else to make the point where it might be seen as a criticism.

- Doug Saunders rightly points out that inequality is an even more serious issue on a global scale than a national one. And it's long past time for some concerted effort to counter the class that's fighting to increase it on both levels.

- Which naturally means that some renewed recognition of the value of organized labour in representing the interests of non-elites is in order.

- Finally, Harper patronage Senate appointee Don Plett is going for the yuks:

Former Conservative party president Don Plett, now a Tory senator, rejects the notion that the power of the party has become too concentrated in the hands of a few individuals in Ottawa.

He points to the fact that national councillors and the party president are still elected, that riding associations can vote to turf incumbent candidates and that policies are still voted on by members on the convention floor.

That's right: apparently Plett's best examples of the democracy allowed for by the Cons include a rigged process which ensured that not a single incumbent MP actually faced the type of vote which Plett is bragging about.

Wednesday Afternoon Links

Words and phrases for your mid-week reading.

- Tasha Kheiriddin unloads on Stephen Harper for his latest promise-breaking set of Senate appointments from Senate reformer's perspective:

The case for abolishing the Senate just got another boost with the announcement by newly-minted Senator Larry Smith that he will be seeking a seat in the House of Commons, as the potential Conservative candidate for the Montreal riding of Lac-St-Louis.
...
That Mr. Smith will collect his $132,000 a year Senate salary, while spending time beating the bushes of Lac-St-Louis – and presumably very little time on the job in Ottawa – is insulting to taxpayers generally, and to the riding’s voters in particular.
...
So why is Mr. Harper committing a personal foul against a member of his own team? This decision is right up there with axing the mandatory long-form census, and musing about rewriting O Canada: a game plan that drops the ball.

- Dubya at LRT has a radical proposal which would certainly shake up the Canadian political scene:

What I would propose is for the BQ and NDP to begin to work together in Parliament. I would suggest the parties cooperate like the CDU and CSU in Germany. This would have the advantage of making the combined party the official opposition immediately. This would help end the sham that Michael Ignatieff and the Liberal Party are actually an opposition to the Harper Conservative government. We should always remember the original name of John A. MacDonald’s party was the “Liberal-Conservatives”. It is time to end the sham that the Liberals are an opposition to the elitist-globalist government of Stephen Harper. The Liberals and Conservatives are different factions of the same party vying only for patronage and power. All the while they laugh at the people who think they are different.
...
(H)ere is what these groups would federate around and for:
1) no austerity in Canada
2) no war for Canada
3) no deficits paid for by people filled with corporate giveaways.

The budget would be the only whipped vote. Every other vote would be free. Yes free. Free like they are supposed to be in a democracy.

Of course, there would likely be some significant obstacles to such cooperation in both parties as they currently stand - and I for one would be inclined to see the NDP work more to pick up Bloc voters than to formally team up with the party. But with some pundits already theorizing that the Bloc may be looking for ways to get around the argument that it can't contribute to the governance of Canada, it's certainly worth contemplating how different the political scene would look if the two parties perpetually dismissed as standing no chance of power could cooperate to get close to it.

- Thomas Walkom traces the current demise of CPP improvements to the rise of the Wildrose Alliance. But I'd think there's reason for suspicion that the federal Cons would have looked for reason not to move ahead with a valuable public program even if Ted Morton hadn't sabotaged the idea.

- Finally, E.J. Dionne's column on the need for progressives to win some business support is worth a read. But I'd argue that there's a big difference between a broader "business community moderately supportive of social reform" and single-issue corporate ally which can turn a specific program to its own ends - and a stronger focus on the former might do a world of good in avoiding the ability of the latter to hijack a progressive agenda.