Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Matthew O'Brien is the latest to pick up on the connection between pre-transfer income equality, redistribution and sustainable economic growth:

Redistribution overall helps, and at least doesn't harm, growth spells. That's because the positive effects of less inequality add to or offset the negligible, or negative, effects of redistribution itself. When redistribution is in the bottom 75 percent, these positive effects are the only ones, and growth lasts longer. And when redistribution is in the top 25 percent, these positive effects make up for the negative ones from taxing-and-transferring so much—it's a statistically insignificant wash.

So countries that spread the wealth around more seem to grow more and grow longer than countries that don't.

[Update: Paul Krugman has more. ]

- And Laura D'Andrea Tyson points out that minimum wage increases are particularly important for women (who make up a disproportionate number of low-wage workers):

Less than half of all workers are women, but they account for 75 percent of workers in the 10 lowest-paid occupations and about 60 percent of minimum wage workers. And most women earning the minimum wage are not teenagers, or wives who can rely on a spouse’s income.

About three-quarters of female minimum wage workers are above the age of 20, and about three-quarters of these women are on their own. Many, of course, are working and taking care of children.
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(T)he prevailing view among economists, reinforced by rigorous studies over the last decade, is that a modest increase would boost the wages of millions of workers and have little to no negative effect on employment. A higher minimum wage would also enhance labor productivity, reduce worker turnover and absenteeism, and lower the costs of recruiting and training employees.

Despite the evidence, Congressional Republicans have pounced on a recent estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, as Democrats have proposed, could reduce employment by 0.3 percent, or 500,000 jobs, by the end of 2015. For reasons that have been raised by a variety of experts, I doubt this estimate.

But even if it’s correct, let’s be careful to recognize what the C.B.O. also emphasized: The higher wage would directly benefit 16.5 million workers currently making less than $10.10 an hour, and as many as 8 million additional workers currently earning slightly more, and would lift 900,000 people out of poverty.

- Dr. Dawg and Stephen Maher both weigh in on the judicial appointment of Vic Toews. And on a similar theme, Michael Harris uses the Cons' cover-up of Brad Butt's legislative fraud to discuss how Stephen Harper rewards blatant lying within his caucus.

- Meanwhile, Jeffrey Simpson discusses the Cons' continued misuse of public resources for partisan self-promotion.

- Finally, Josh Bolotsky comments on the right's success in determining what issues are acceptable for public debate - and what progressive activists need to do to turn the tide in our favour:

The most important thing about the Overton window...is that it can be shifted to the left or the right, with the once merely “acceptable” becoming “popular” or even imminent policy, and formerly “unthinkable” positions becoming the open position of a partisan base. The challenge for activists and advocates is to move the window in the direction of their preferred outcomes, so their desired outcome moves closer and closer to “common sense.”

There are two ways to do this: the long, hard way and the short, easy way. The long, hard way is to continue making your actual case persistently and persuasively until your position becomes more politically mainstream, whether it be due to the strength of your rhetoric or a long-term shift in societal values. By contrast, the short, easy way is to amplify and echo the voices of those who take a position a few notches more radical than what you really want.

For example, if what you actually want is a public health care option in the United States, coordinate with and promote those pushing for single-payer, universal health care. If the single-payer approach constitutes the “acceptable left” flank of the discourse, then the public option looks, by comparison, like the conservative option it was once considered back when it was first proposed by Orrin Hatch in 1994.

This is Negotiating 101. Unfortunately, the right has been far ahead of the left in moving the Overton window in their desired direction for a long time. If anything, the left often plays it in the exact wrong way, actively policing and seeking to silence its radicals for fear that strong left positions will serve to discredit moderate left positions. The irony is that the Overton window should actually be easier for progressives to play: if you look at the polling on issue after issue, from education to jobs to foreign policy, the actual majority stances tend to be to the left of the range of policy proposals on offer.

On self-interest

With Chuck Strahl's massive conflict of interest between lobbying and patronage appointments already making news, the revelation that Vic Toews has found his way into the lobbying industry (having seemingly planned for it before he'd even resigned from Parliament) looks all the more noteworthy. And Toews' assertion that a lawyer who would seem to have accumulated substantial pensions through three different public roles has "got to make a living" trading off his political connections speaks volumes about how far removed Stephen Harper and has cabinet ministers are from the reality facing most Canadians.

That said, Toews' position does seem to fit the new revolving door into the Cons' typical pattern of ethical commentary.

As with centralized control, the misuse of public money for partisan purposes and a lack of accountability, lobbying looks to be just another area where the Cons have gone out of their way to do in government what they decried in opposition. And the U.S. influence seems to be unmistakable - as Toews is fully embracing the view that a transition from public office to a lobbying role should be both common and lucrative.

But Toews' addition to the list of Cons-turned-lobbyists does raise the question of how so many members of Harper's inner circle leave public service with the apparent assumption that their lone remaining purpose is to cash in. And it's not hard to see that mindset as a continuation of the Cons' attitude that governing is solely about helping themselves rather than the country.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Cory Doctorow duly blasts the Harper Cons for meekly complying with an onerous copyright treaty which isn't even in force. Which raises the question: if the Cons were really interested in demonstrating some independence as a response to the U.S. declining to rubber-stamp Keystone XL, wouldn't this be the best time to show some backbone?

- Mike Blanchfield reports on the conclusions of the UN's right-to-food envoy - including that the Harper Cons have managed to make food less accessible for Canadians through means ranging from the destruction of the long-form census to an insistence on signing ill-advised trade pacts.

- Meanwhile, CBC highlights Vic Toews' stunning claim that if the Cons appointed a desperately flawed candidate to head up Canada's security watchdog, it's the fault of other parties for not sufficiently pointing out that the Cons are utterly clueless and unfit to govern. So in the interest of helping Toews out: YOU ARE UTTERLY CLUELESS AND UNFIT TO GOVERN. PLEASE STOP YOUR CURRENT ACTIONS BEFORE YOU DO ANY FURTHER DAMAGE.

- James Stewart tests the theory that income tax rates result in any meaningful movement among the 1%. And not surprisingly, our corporate overlords are much less likely to move themselves than their assets into tax havens.

- Finally, Tim Harper wonders whether crossing the floor should carry a penalty for MPs.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material to end your Saturday.

- Jim Stanford looks in detail at the aftereffects of free trade with the U.S., and finds rather little to cheer:

In sum, the promise that free trade would induce more trade, productivity growth, and higher incomes (following traditional Heckscher-Ohlin mechanisms) is not remotely supported by the aggregate economic data. FTA defenders will critique this argument on many grounds. They say we should compare this data to an unknowable counterfactual (namely, where Canada would be in 2012 without the FTA), rather than to the pre-FTA reality. They will parse detailed sub-sector data to find evidence that productivity grew relatively faster in those industries which experienced larger tariff reduction, compared to other sectors. (Daniel Trefler has done much work in this vein – but it doesn’t negate the fact that overall Canadian productivity has languished.) These arguments do not alter the finding that the FTA has not been associated with more trade, higher productivity, or higher incomes – contrary to the promises made when it was implemented. And hence the promises now being made that more FTAs (with Europe, Korea, India, or the entire Trans-Pacific region) will do just that, must be viewed with disbelief.

So it is not the “free trade deniers” (like myself) that inhabit a fantasy world. No matter how loudly Trade Minister Fast asserts that only an economic illiterate would dare to question the virtues of free trade, it’s his side of the debate that relies on faith, rather than fact.

- Far too many people seem to be treating Paul Wells' piece about the decline of the Libs as an ordinary "rivals crowding the centre" message. But the more significant part of Wells' analysis looks to be this one:

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives reliably depict the Liberals as high-taxing statists who cannot imagine leaving a dollar in your pocket when they could spend it on daycare or a fancy census instead. Intriguingly, (Paul) Adams argues nearly the opposite: that the Liberals’ long-standing “progressive impulses” were “quietly muted in a largely collaborative project” between Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin during the almost nine years Martin served in Chrétien’s cabinet.

The Liberals’ 1993 Red Book included promises to renegotiate NAFTA, to boost immigration levels and to create 50,000 daycare spaces. None was implemented. To Adams (whose book argues, probably in vain, for a Liberal-NDP merger), the result was that the Liberals blew their credibility as defenders of activist government.

“As you stare at the wreckage of what was arguably the most successful party in the history of the democratic world, there are various explanations for its utter demagnetization in 2011,” Adams writes. “Some of them were very long-term. But one of them, surely, must have been its wilful refusal to differentiate its policies from those of the Conservatives.”

- Meanwhile, David Dayen notes that a similar problem has developed among Democrats in the U.S. - and there unlike in Canada, voters haven't enjoyed another option to express their desire for progressive change:

Obama comes at the end of a 30-year cycle of narrowing and narrowing what passes for the liberal agenda. The landscape was so different in the 1970s that Nixon was calling for a guaranteed income. Now when Democrats are really feeling bold, they highlight policies that they are proud to reveal were based on Republican ideas of just a few years earlier, things like the Heritage Foundation’s health care plan or the market-based solution of cap and trade.

I would disagree that liberalism – although that’s probably the wrong phrase – has disappeared. It’s just become hidden beneath a thicket of campaign contributions from wealthy donors. The decline of unions as a political counterweight means that Democrats chase big money, and not surprisingly they respond to big money concerns. Issues like poverty, hunger, and need go unremarked upon on the national stage, even while they remain core concerns at the community level.
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(T)he agenda at the upper echelon of the Democratic Party has narrowed over the past 50 years, and it’s not like the safety net is so stable and robust that there’s nothing more to do. In fact, our social safety net is among the tiniest in the industrialized world. But poor people don’t have lobbyists, and that’s how Washington works these days. 

 - While the Cons' enforced mindlessness has continued since Parliament resumed, at least one NDP strategy to challenge the subservience of Con MPs looks to be earning some positive reviews.

- Finally, Dennis Gruending weighs in on the Cons' decision to make Christianity the exclusive religion available to Canadian prisoners.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Joan Bryden reports on the Cons' latest abuses of majority government power, this time in allocating and shuffling around the few opposition days already available in Parliament for their own purposes. But it's worth noting the difference between the responses of the affected parties.

On the one hand, Marc Garneau's answer falls into the familiar trap of hoping that the public will rally around the Libs' sense of grievance at being mistreated by the Cons:

Liberals say government House leader Peter Van Loan told his Liberal counterpart, Marc Garneau, that the less-than-optimal timing was deliberate, payback for the Liberals using their last opposition day to hammer the government over the impact of budget cuts on food safety.

What apparently sparked Van Loan's ire was that Liberals had compared the cuts to those made by the former Conservative government of Mike Harris in Ontario, which they linked to the deadly E. coli outbreak in Walkerton. Liberals helpfully pointed out that a number of senior ministers in the Harper government were also members of the Harris cabinet, including Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.

"That 'went too far' and so wings had to be clipped," interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae wrote Friday in a blog post, recounting Van Loan's explanation for the timing of the Liberals' next opposition day.

Rae cited the incident as one of many examples that Canadians are "now living in a democracy with dictatorial tendencies."

On the other, Nathan Cullen's response paints the Cons themselves as missing the point by engaging in such petty efforts to derail debate:

"Did they give us a short day as a punishment? Whatever. You now, they're in the bubble," shrugged NDP House leader Nathan Cullen.

"They can punish away. OK. What were we trying to do? We were trying to be accountable to Canadians. So, who had a good week, who had a bad week is always the question at the end of these kinds of things."

In Cullen's opinion, "punishing us doesn't make them look strong; it makes them look weak," as though the government is afraid of open debate on its own policies.

- Leah DeVellis and Kelly McParland are both rightly appalled by Vic Toews' latest effort to vilify prison inmates - this time by attacking the already-meager income inmates are entitled to earn while incarcerated.

- Ezra Klein neatly juxtaposes how U.S. tax policy designed to disproportionately benefit the wealthy has only added to already-worrisome growth in equality.

- Meanwhile, if we're looking for examples as to how a failure to take health into account as an important social goal leads to results which everybody can agree to be disastrous, the return of whooping cough as a result of short-sighted budget cuts and anti-science hysteria surely fits the bill.

- Finally, I'm not quite sure how Thomas Friedman missed the pattern of anything and everything being up for sale for advertising purposes - and he still seems to miss the point that there's plenty of appetite to pay taxes to support the services people need. But having clued in, he serves up some well-justified concerns:

“Over the last three decades,” he states, “we have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society. A market economy is a tool — a valuable and effective tool — for organizing productive activity. But a ‘market society’ is a place where everything is up for sale. It is a way of life where market values govern every sphere of life.”

Why worry about this trend? Because, Sandel argues, market values are crowding out civic practices. When public schools are plastered with commercial advertising, they teach students to be consumers rather than citizens. When we outsource war to private military contractors, and when we have separate, shorter lines for airport security for those who can afford them, the result is that the affluent and those of modest means live increasingly separate lives, and the class-mixing institutions and public spaces that forge a sense of common experience and shared citizenship get eroded. 

...

Throughout our society, we are losing the places and institutions that used to bring people together from different walks of life. Sandel calls this the “skyboxification of American life,” and it is troubling. Unless the rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think of ourselves as engaged in a common project. At a time when to fix our society we need to do big, hard things together, the marketization of public life becomes one more thing pulling us apart. “The great missing debate in contemporary politics,” Sandel writes, “is about the role and reach of markets.” We should be asking where markets serve the public good, and where they don’t belong, he argues. And we should be asking how to rebuild class-mixing institutions. 

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Linda McQuaig is hopeful that Quebec's student protests against tuition hikes might remind many Canadians that we can do more than just meekly accept austerity and inequality:

What seems to particularly gall some English Canadian commentators is the fact that the Quebec students — who reached a tentative deal with the province on the weekend after a three-month strike — have been protesting tuition hikes that would still leave them with the lowest tuition in the country. Why can’t these spoiled brats be grateful, and go back to...video games and keeping up with the Kardashians like normal, well-adjusted North American youth?

It’s that old problem about Quebec. Somehow people there manage to shake a bit loose from the rigid corporate-imposed mindset that has gripped North America in recent decades, convincing us that we as a society must cut back on things — like university education and old age pensions — that were somehow affordable in days when our society was a lot less rich.

The Quebec students, more attuned to the outside world, have figured out that this self-denial has more to do with dogma than with some new reality allegedly necessitated by the global economy.
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It’s an odd form of self-indulgence. Tens of thousands of students have marched hundreds of hours in the cold, potentially jeopardizing their academic (and financial) futures, in order to champion accessible education for all as the cornerstone of a democratic society.

If only they could be less self indulgent, and stick to drinking, partying and finding themselves a comfortable niche in the corporate world.

- Drew Anderson wonders whether the Cons have lost their touch in attacking opposition leaders based on their tepid initial swipes at Thomas Mulcair:

The long waiting game is over. Finally, the ruthless attack machine of the Conservative Party has roared to life and taken aim at Tom Mulcair. A little later than expected, to be sure, but with the deepest warchest in Canadian politics and a mean streak the size of Lake Superior, surely worth the wait.

Except it’s not. It’s just a website. And a really bad one at that.
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Harper’s Conservatives are worried that negative attacks might actually help the NDP unite the non-Conservative vote, something they are desperate to avoid.

Nothing would highlight that the NDP is now the main threat to the Conservatives like unleashing a negative barrage. Nothing would serve as a better rallying point for non-Conservatives. Certainly nothing would bring in more money to the NDP coffers.

The Harper Conservatives know this, and so while surely not happy to be looking up at their main opponent, they took a pass on defining their main opponent in favour of riding out the honeymoon. For now they seem resigned to snipe around the edges on amateurish websites and keep their powder dry for another day.

At least until someone pokes the dragon in the eye.

But I'll add a third distinguishing factor between now and the timing of the Cons' previous campaigns against Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff: instead of having to frame an opposition leader immediately based on the prospect of a snap election, they can count on holding power for three and a half more years no matter how ineffective their attacks are. And we shouldn't be entirely surprised if the Cons use that extra time to allow messages to build up over a period of years - rather than seeing a need to launch their strongest slams at the outset.

- Meanwhile, Dave Cournoyer muses about what Thomas Mulcair's brazen recognition of Dutch disease might do to federal politics in Western Canada. But it's well worth keeping in mind that the interests of Suncor aren't necessary the same as those of actual citizens - and as much as Brad Wall has been allowed to write his own headlines about Mulcair's comments, the message that the supposed benefits of a petro-state aren't all they're cracked up to be will find a receptive argument in a good chunk of the West as well.
 
- Finally, kudos to Tu Thanh Ha for not only reporting on the latest example of the Federal Court of Appeal finding a breach of natural justice in Vic Toews' treatment of Canadian citizens abroad, but also putting it in context within a longstanding Con pattern of neglect.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- Tabatha Southey speculates as to the inevitable results when the Cons try to summon the entire Internet to answer for its political activity.

- David Olive points out that for anybody who wants to buy into "tax freedom day" messaging, the corporate sector is relieved of any responsibility to contribute to the public good far before we mere citizens.

- Mike de Souza notes that it's an unreasonable lack of consultation with First Nations - not phantom foreign funding - that poses a real risk to the Cons' latest tar sands promotion project.

- Meanwhile, David Pugliese reports on the obvious consequences of the Cons using Canada's military as a partisan research agency - as opposition MPs will have no reason to think they'll be dealt with as anything but political enemies.

- Sasha Issenberg writes about Barack Obama's efforts to present a new type of politics focussing on targeted appeals based on specific voter concerns rather than mass robocalls and blast messages - offering a model which I'd love to see the NDP follow over the next few years.

- Finally, Bruce Johnstone notes that it hasn't taken long for the dominoes to start toppling after the Cons' destruction of the single-desk Canadian Wheat Board - and Viterra, which was supposed to be our bulwark against foreign control of Canada's food industry, instead looks like it'll be the first piece of the industry to get sold off.

A friendly reminder

Some people who should know better are suggesting that universal media condemnation (as opposed to public involvement on social media) should be seen as the main factor in getting the Cons to climb back down on arbitrary online surveillance. So let's take a ride in the wayback machine.

It wasn't long ago that the Cons sprung a nasty surprise on the country on another issue, and were met with similarly strong and unanimous criticism from the media in response. Does anybody remember how willing they were to change course based on editorial ire in the absence of the same level of public outcry?

Of course, the above shouldn't be taken to suggest all social media campaigns are equally desirable or effective - and I'd think the brilliant #tellviceverything hashtag did far more to move the needle than the more controversial @vikileaks account. But the last thing we can afford is for the public to think it's best off staying out of the way and leaving criticism of the Cons to the opinion pages alone.

[Edit: fixed wording.]

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- No, it isn't much surprise that poll respondents may think we've moved to the right as a country: after all, Con propaganda (largely echoed by the media) has been declaring that for years. But as Warren Kinsella notes, that perception bears no resemblance whatsoever to Canadians' opinions about actual issues.

- Thomas Walkom points out the glaring gap between what Don Drummond rightly suggested should be done in allocating, and what his recommendations would actually do:

Don Drummond, Ontario’s adviser on everything, says the harsh government spending cuts he wants must be seen as fair to succeed — they must hit everyone.

In fact, they almost certainly won’t. The well-off will fare better than the poor and middle class. Public sector employees will be hit harder than those in the private sector.

Groups with political clout — such as the multinational pharmaceutical firms that charge prices Drummond deems too high — are sure to successfully resist proposals that they share the pain. They’ve done so before.
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That the rich will fare best under Drummond is true by definition.

The well-to-do depend less on government programs than the poor and middle class. That is a fact. Drummond’s call for government to roll back the Ontario Child Benefit will hurt poor families who receive the subsidy. It will not affect the rich who do not.

Nor are the wealthy being asked to chip in through higher progressive taxes. Drummond did advocate that some taxes, including those on property and gasoline, be hiked. He even wants a special tax (he calls it a user fee) levied on rural parents who bus their children to school.

But these kinds of regressive taxes hit the poor and middle class proportionally harder than the rich. A surtax on high-income earners could correct that bias. But Premier Dalton McGuinty specifically told Drummond to stay away from such remedies.

- pogge wonders how ministers with no clue what's in the bills they're demagoguing about fit into the Mostly Competent Government promised of the Cons. And Dr. Dawg anticipates what's coming next on the legislative front.

- Finally, Stephen Maher and Don Martin are among the latest commentators to criticize the Cons' obsession with online surveillance. And the Ottawa Citizen notes that at least some parts of the Cons' bill - though not the most galling ones - can be traced directly to legislation introduced by the Martin Libs.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Michelle Lalonde notes that despite continued giveaways from both the federal and provincial governments, Quebec's asbestos industry may soon fade away due to a lack of any economic case for private funding.

- Jessica Bruno reports on major cuts to the federal public sector which have been inflicted without any particular accountability so far - including job losses among the civil servants responsible for key areas like employment insurance, immigration and health.

- Meanwhile, that is indeed Canada's public safety minister getting rebuked yet again by the courts for improperly denying the rights of Canadians abroad.

- Steve rightly notes that the media's lack of interest in the NDP leadership campaign has much more to do with its own shallow political coverage than any shortage of interest within the party.

- Nancy Peckford points to Sana Hassainia's example as a case of our political institutions utterly failing to take into account the needs of new parents and others whose voices are all too often shut out.

- Finally, Stephen Maher reminds us why Stephen Harper has silenced his party's members for so long - as the first few outbursts under a majority government have been on the ugly side.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Tim Harper comments on the Harper Cons' collusion in a war against Canada's middle class:

Under the Investment Canada Act, (foreign) takeovers are supposed to demonstrate a “net benefit” to Canada, but, in fact, are acting as an anvil on wages, living standards and the prosperity of communities in central Canada.

MacDowall says breaks should only be offered to small or medium companies that actually want to set up shop and create jobs here.

Both opposition parties in Ottawa have called for a review of the Investment Canada Act, which has been exposed time and time again as a paper tiger by foreign corporations in this country.

The NDP says tax credits to companies should be tied to job creation — the credit would only kick in when the jobs are created.

Federal Conservatives largely ran for cover but the few who were brave enough (or ordered to) face the cameras Friday were quick to engage in buck-passing.
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Every politician, federal or provincial, who stood by and watched this performance — where a 50 per cent pay cut was somehow described as an “offer” rather than the threat it was — has to answer for their neglect.

- Meanwhile, David Olive rightly criticizes Caterpillar's bad-faith actions as just a particularly galling example of the type of corporate-dominated economy the Cons are trying to push.

- And Sixth Estate nicely demonstrates another facet of that utterly unbalanced business-first ideology in challenging one of the more ludicrous examples of Fraser Institute astroturfing - this time in the form of a claim that thousands of preventable deaths from air pollution should be considered acceptable if they serve the cause of corporate profits.

- CfSR catches Vic Toews claiming a need for secrecy over information that's available on a public website in order to avoid answering for his government's actions.

- Finally, Andrew Jackson answers the nonsensical line that the existence of Old Age Security somehow prevents anybody from working past 65 as a matter of choice by pointing out that actual data proves otherwise. Elizabeth Thompson breaks down seniors' income by geography and gender to point out who stands to lose the most in attacks on retirement income. (Who would ever have guessed that the Cons might make women take the brunt of their ill-advised policies?) And Robert Brown suggests putting any debate about the OAS on a factual foundation - though when (as Brown notes) those facts are that the current system is entirely sustainable and the Cons' anticipated change would be deliberately and gratuitously regressive, the question of what should be done answers itself. [Update: see also Dave and Owen]

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Carol Goar notes that the Cons' decision to mess with retirement security may be just the type of issue to rouse voters who had been lulled to sleep by promises of stability - which seems more plausible than Chantal Hebert's theory that the Cons can reasonably expect to benefit politically by focusing attention on exactly the kind of cuts they can only get away with in relative silence. Meanwhile, Ellen Roseman points out that an increase in the eligibility age makes no sense at all and Trish Hennessy runs the numbers on how cuts to OAS might play out.

- Meanwhile, in the "accountability for thee but not for me" department, the Cons want to stoke outrage over CBC salaries while jealously hiding what we're paying Stephen Harper's PMO spinners. And the Cons are also making the stunning claim that e-mails sent in response to media questions can't be quoted.

- But in fairness, encounters with reality have had a tendency not to end well for the Cons.

- Finally, Paul Moist weighs in on the NDP's leadership campaign by pointing out the wider role the party needs to play in speaking for workers.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Stephen Maher nicely summarizes Tony Clement's sad committee appearance yesterday:

The evidence shows that Clement chose the projects himself, in some kind of mysterious process in his riding office. He has steadfastly denied that, and even helpfully pointed out to reporters in September why that would have been wrong.

“If I was the decision-maker, if I had set up a parallel process — and created a situation where the auditor general did not know, that’s their accusation — I’d be resigning right now and turning myself into the local police office.”

Clement’s logic is plain: since choosing the projects himself would have been wrong, he obviously did not do so. He must deny it, forever and with great sincerity, which is what he spent Wednesday doing.
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New Democrat MP Charlie Angus, the fiery former punk singer from Timmins, Ont., made a strong argument on Wednesday that Clement should get a new assignment.

“This is about your fundamental competence,” he said. “It gets to the question of how you do business, when the auditor general says you broke the rules.”

Clement — who is now president of the Treasury Board, the minister in charge of interpreting and administering the spending rules for the federal government — admitted he made mistakes.

“The auditor general said she was concerned about the lack of documentation,” he said. “I take that to heart. The paperwork for this was not perfect.”

“Not perfect?” Angus interrupted, incredulous. “It doesn’t exist.”

“I take my share of responsibility for that and certainly I have learned that there are different ways and better ways to provide these kinds of intake processes, and I commit myself to using them,” said Clement.

Angus was not mollified.

“When people started asking questions, you said, ‘I’m sorry, the dog ate my homework. I’ll do better the next time.’ What are you doing at Treasury Board?”

It’s a good question.

- Meanwhile, Vic Toews helped Clement out by offering his own jaw-droppingly ignorant spin, criticizing the NDP's Joe Comartin for having acted as a defence lawyer.

- Yes, it's true enough that a series of provincial elections likely cut into the federal NDP's fund-raising efforts. But I'd still think the third-quarter numbers present a clear indication that the party has a long way to go in making sure that its fund-raising and other member involvement catch up to its vote and seat totals - and we'll have to keep a close eye on how the numbers change over the next two quarters when the base should be fully involved.

- Finally, Paul Gingrich examines the state of post-secondary education costs in Saskatchewan, and finds that the Sask Party's tuition hikes have undone much of the good accomplished by the NDP' previous freeze.

A need for debate

It's been pointed out elsewhere that the Cons are invoking closure on multiple difference types of legislation in order to ensure that their sweeping changes aren't subject to proper public debate. And in most cases, their excuse is that the bills have largely been introduced and debated in a relatively similar form before, so they're free to short-circuit any democratic processes now.

Needless to say, we shouldn't buy the argument for a second. But to the extent that is the Cons' explanation, it bears mentioning that the provisions of the Cons' recently-introduced gun registry bill ordering the immediate destruction of all records (to ensure that provinces can't set up their own registries) are nowhere to be found in the pseudo-private member's bill the Cons previously used to push the issue. Which should make this one bill that demands a full debate even on the Cons' account.

Saturday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Armine Yalnizyan points out what a "Buffett tax" could do for Canada:

Put Larry and his 99 fellow CEOs together, and they could put almost a 10% down payment on a national program to bring dental care to school kids. Canadians spend more than $13 billion on dental care, and cavities are 100% preventable. Talk about putting our money where our mouths are—the savings would be enormous.

But you don’t need to be a millionaire to make a difference. If the 8,000 Canadians who received stock options as part of incomes over $250,000 paid taxes on this money at the same rate as the rest of their income—treating executive compensation the same way you treat the income of any other working stiff—it would have raised $337 million for federal coffers in 2009, a down year for options.

Now take that argument a little further. Canada’s federal personal income tax rate is 29% on all incomes above $129,000. That’s much lower than the current top rate of 35% in the U.S.—a rate that’s likely to rise. A new bracket that taxed incomes over $250,000 at 32%, lower than the 33% rate applied to that income level in the U.S., would raise about $2 billion. That could pay for the federal share of a national child-care program.
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A 35% tax bracket for Canadians whose income is higher than $750,000—the U.S. top rate, except there it’s applied when your income hits $373,650—would yield $1.2 billion. That, for example, could start to address all our aging nationwide wastewater infrastructure.

- But of course, the Cons have other ideas as to what's most important. And Vic Toews is dictating that provinces have no choice but to slash social spending in order to pay for new prisons required by the Cons' dumb-on-crime legislation.

- Rory MacLean reports on the need for a Saskatchewan provincial water strategy. But since a massive part of the problem arises from water wasted by the oil industry in Alberta, we can rest assured that Brad Wall's Sask Party won't have any interest in listening.

- Finally, Naomi Klein writes about the importance of Occupy Wall Street (the movement it's spawning around the globe).

Deep thought

If there's any more important qualification for a Harper Con cabinet member than being described as "incredibly stupid" with a "colossal lack of judgment", it's a willingess to mislead the public.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- The Halifax Chronicle Herald pushes back against the Cons' and Libs' anti-Bloc witch-hunt:

For partisan reasons, involvement with the Bloc has become a game of political football. The Tories and Grits feel like they’ve scored a touchdown because Ms. Turmel’s cancellation of her Bloc membership was so recent. The NDP have responded with a field goal. After all, Mr. Lebel did quit the Bloc 10 years ago. Even if the man had ever been a sovereigntist, surely he’d be entitled to change his mind.

The only reason the Grits haven’t been scored on since this controversy began is because they don’t have a current MP whose federalist credentials are questionable. But for all their grandstanding, they too have welcomed bloquistes back into the fold — and not just any bloquiste, either.

The Liberals’ former MP Jean Lapierre, now a broadcaster, is the prototype of a federalist coming full circle. He quit the Grits after Jean Chrétien became leader, became a founding member of the Bloc, then was welcomed back years later as Paul Martin’s Quebec lieutenant.

It’s time to call off this game on account of hypocrisy. The last message we should be sending Quebecers, now that they have opted back in to federalist politics, is this: "Once a sovereigntist, always a sovereigntist, even if you were never really a sovereigntist."

- Yes, it's noteworthy that Jim Prentice at least hinted at a cap-and-trade system in dealing with Alberta's provincial government. But far more significant than the tentative behind-the-scenes discussion is the fact that even one of the Cons' supposed star ministers couldn't get the job done - and since his departure, the Cons are now running as far as possible from any attempt to deal with greenhouse gas emissions.

- And speaking of policies the Cons want to send down the memory hole, Alison catches the Cons disappearing their previous bragging about Canadian oil investment in Syria.

- Finally, Tim Harper points out that the Cons' secrecy in negotiating yet another security deal with the U.S. is only fuelling Canadian suspicions about what they want to give up. But it's well worth noting that the public apparently isn't seen as an "important stakeholder" in the process:

Toews says his government is not going to negotiate in public.

Important stakeholders have been consulted, and the government is grappling with the question of at what point to bring the broader public into the discussion.

The signs are not encouraging.

Toews has already set up the NDP as the enemy, predicting they would merely “politicize” any public hearings because they are philosophically against any trade deals and are mired in an outdated protectionist mindset.

But, in fact, the only NDP criticism so far has centred on the secretive nature of the process.

If the Harper government is not prepared to come into the daylight at some point and tell Canadians specifically what it may be negotiating away, the NDP criticism will be the predominant Canadian point of view.

For those paying attention, it likely already is.

Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Marc Lee tears into the "unfunded liabilities" spin on public benefits which is now making an appearance in Canada:

(W)hat’s missing from this horror movie is that this is an artifact of CPP being a mostly pay-as-you-go plan. The report calculates all future payouts to beneficiaries, less current holdings of financial assets, but ASSUMES that all CPP contributions from workers present and future ceased. It is as if the CPP closed shop and took in no more premium revenues and simply paid out its legal obligations. On this basis, my telephone connection is an unfunded liability running thousands of dollars because I do not have that money in the bank to pre-fund those future phone bills.

In the real world, we have to consider both income/revenues and expenditures, particularly since the CPP is “intended to be long-term and enduring in nature,” according to the Chief Actuary. So a second calculation that does include future contributions from workers, and this basically wipes out the “unfunded liability”, though not entirely. By this second estimate there is still a shortfall of $6.9 billion, but this is over the coming 75 years and amounts of 0.3% of the CPP’s liabilities.

The gist of the Chief Actuary’s report is that the CPP is financially sound for at least the next 75 years.
...
(S)urpluses are being accumulated and invested in financial markets. A decade from now, those surpluses will be depleted and expenditures will exceed contributions, with the difference made up by income from accumulated assets. Those CPP assets are currently worth $143 billion and are anticipated to continue to rise, even amid negative cash flow from premiums less benefits. That is, only a share of investment income will be needed to keep payments up, and the rate of return on CPP assets would have to drop big time for the plan to start drawing down its capital at all.

So when the right cries “unfunded liabilities” do not panic. They are either mis-informed or deliberately trying to mislead you.

- Barbara Ehrenreich writes about how the U.S. has turned poverty into a crime.

- Pogge points out the latest example of the Cons' deliberate know-nothingness being both a point of pride and an all-purpose excuse for ignoring realities which don't fit their political spin.

- Finally, Claude Denis offers up some more educational content about the realities of Quebec politics:

Much has been written over the years about the effect of the Bloc’s electoral dominance on Quebecers’ sense of belonging to Canada: that it has insulated them, weakened their sense of responsibility for the governance of the country, etc. But we are now seeing that the Bloc has also enabled non-Quebecers to ignore Quebec, to treat it as a non-entity when it comes to governing Canada. So, since the early 1990s, Canada has been governed essentially without francophone Quebec, and people outside Quebec like it just fine.

Now the NDP has come along to upset that happy blindness. Canadians outside Quebec are being shown that if Quebecers are going to rejoin the game of governing this country, the game itself is going to change. This was a risky gamble from the start for the NDP: speaking convincingly to Quebecers might alienate other Canadians. Indeed, the New Democrats had faced this choice many times before and had always shrunk from the challenge.

Jack Layton decided to go for it. He and his team are trying to articulate a new language of solidarity on the centre-left, between Quebecers and other Canadians. The first difficulty was to bring enough Quebecers on board. The second one, likely to prove the greater, is now to make other Canadians accept a change in their own sense of the country, of themselves, and of Quebec.
...
Layton’s mistake — if any — has been to call attention to Turmel and to what she represents too soon. The plan was to engage Canadians and Quebecers in a renewed political conversation over the next several years. Obviously, and sadly, circumstances forced Layton’s hand. Considering that Canadians outside Quebec have not had time to adjust to new realities brought on by the “vague orange,” he might have chosen someone else, most likely not from Quebec, and delayed a reckoning.

But who knows if and when this would have been possible? As it is, rather than looking at this as a mistake, I would rather see Layton’s choice as another courageous gamble. In effect, he is telling his fellow Canadians: “open your eyes.” Please.

New column day

Blogging may be on hold for the week, but columnizing isn't. Here's my latest, on the Cons' disaster response and the broader question of what we expect from our elected leaders in a time of crisis.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- thwap is among a few bloggers to rightly slam the Cons' obscene message to flooded Quebeckers that the only way they can hope for help is if somebody stands to profit from it:

Toews (is) justifying removing Canadian Forces from helping with the clean-up after a Quebec flood, NOT apparently as punishment for Quebec voters having rejected harpercon villainy, but because they're worried that they'll displace private sector service providers inspired by the idea of profiting from their misfortune.

Furthermore, the services you're asking for -- if they were authorized -- would place the Canadian Forces in competition with the private sector, at the local or provincial level, which could perform this type of repair work.

Ah! But Vic! Doesn't the same logic justify having all our work in Afghanistan carried out by mercenaries and private prison contractors? Why should we deprive mercenaries of a chance to make a buck out of some misplaced devotion to archaic ideas about who should fight wars on the taxpayers' dime?

- Erin notes the good news in the B.C. Libs' latest HST machinations:

Now that BC’s opposition has successfully pushed back on the HST, the government is starting to follow the logic of its own argument, promising to combine the HST with a corporate tax increase. However, the reversal of BC’s corporate tax cuts would not collect enough revenue to fully offset the removal of sales tax from business inputs.

Nevertheless, this development seems to improve the chances of BC restoring its corporate tax rate to a more appropriate level. More broadly, it weakens the narrative that corporate taxes must always and everywhere decline. The business lobby’s acceptance of the government’s plan undermines its usual claims that raising corporate taxes would be unimaginably horrible.

- But even while recognizing how the Libs' reversal fully validates the NDP's position on corporate taxes, Seth Klein points out some significant obstacles to the move based on their previous rationale for lowering the corporate income tax rate:

More importantly, the government has now acknowledged that we can increase corporate income taxes and the sky will not fall. It is no small irony that when Adrian Dix proposed during the NDP leadership race that corporate income taxes be returned to their 2008 level, he was accused by government representatives and media pundits of being a “class warrior”. Yet now Christy Clark has proposed doing just that (and even gone a step further with a proposed delay to planned reductions in the small business tax rate).

And another rather delicious irony: those corporate income taxes reductions since 2008 were part of the carbon tax’s revenue recycling regime. Meaning, if the government did actually increase the corporate income tax, they would have to amend their carbon tax legislation, which requires that the tax be revenue neutral. Again, I’m all for that. The CCPA has long said that making the carbon tax revenue neutral (and giving big tax cuts to business) made little sense, and that the carbon tax income should be partially used to fund other climate initiatives. So nice to know the new Premier is now ready to break with revenue neutrality there.

- Finally, Dan Gardner finds plenty of Stephen Harper positions which look to be mostly unassailable - but only if one goes back as far as 1996 when he was the one challenging the type of distorted top-down politics he now practices:

"In today's democratic societies, organizations share power," wrote two conservative intellectuals.

"Corporations, churches, universities, hospitals, even public sector bureaucracies make decisions through consultation, committees, and consensus-building techniques. Only in politics do we still entrust power to a single faction expected to prevail every time over the opposition by sheer force of numbers.

Even more anachronistically, we persist in structuring the governing team like a military regiment under a single commander with almost total power to appoint, discipline, and expel subordinates. Among major democracies, only Great Britain so ruthlessly concentrates power."

That's a pretty good summary of what I've been writing lately about the Conservative government.

Which is curious. Because the authors are Tom Flanagan and Stephen Harper. Flanagan is a conservative political scientist. And Stephen Harper, well, you know him.
...
"The two parties could begin by agreeing to advocate electoral reform." Scrapping the first-past-the-post system is a realistic possibility, Harper and Flanagan wrote, because the NDP would support it, "allowing even a minority conservative government to pass the necessary legislation."

It was an essential step. "Many of Canada's problems stem from a winner-take-all style of politics that allows governments in Ottawa to impose measures abhorred by large areas of the country."

Change a few details and the Harper/Flanagan essay could be published today. Word for word.
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"Right now, if Harper wanted to, he could be a complete dictator, because there is no way to stop a majority government," Conservative senator Bert Brown observed recently.

There was a time when conservatives found that appalling. But an awful lot of them seem quite comfortable with it today.

What they find appalling, what makes them quiver with indignation, is a journalist who makes the same arguments they once did about a prime minister who has become what he once opposed.