On abdications of duty

Shorter Gerry Ritz:

If unscrupulous businesses want to fleece Canadian suckers consumers, far be it from we Conservatives to stand in their way.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Duncan Cameron highlights the choice between austerity and prosperity facing the governments of both Canada and the U.S.:

The economic realities faced by working people in both Canada and the United States need to be addressed. Talk about putting the fiscal house in order is code for taking money away from working people. It does not preclude giving grossly indecent fiscal advantages to corporations.
...
The debate about the fiscal cliff is important because it helps focus attention on how government policy can have negative or positive effects on quality of life, and living standards.

Getting agreement on the link between spending increases and prosperity would be an improvement over falsehoods put about in Canada and the U.S. about how austerity is necessary to reduce deficits. It is not, and will not. All austerity does is reduce the standard of living of citizens.

 - But David Macdonald worries that the Cons have already made their choice - and that they'll use an economy that's weaker than (oh-so-loudly) advertised as an excuse to make matters all the worse for Canadians. And Thomas Walkom's hope that Jim Flaherty might be merely wrong rather than outright crazy doesn't seem particularly reassuring - particularly keeping in mind that his government's response to the 2008 crash was to push austerity from day one until political calculations intervened.

- Michael Geist explains how the Cons' copyright legislation will affect content creators and users.

- And Andrew Nikiforuk discusses the risks the Cons are pushing on Canada through an investment-protection racket with China.

- Finally, Paul Adams points out the significance of California voters simultaneously voting to raise their own taxes, and giving state Democrats the supermajority they need to have room to maneuver. But I'd think the even more telling sign that tax protest messages may have run their course is that even with an explicit tax increase on their ballot, California voters turned out in relatively low numbers - meaning that anti-taxers weren't able to motivate citizens to vote against it.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Fiery cats.

Leadership 2013 Roundup

With a couple of weeks' worth of developments to address, I'll take a slightly higher-level look at the Saskatchewan NDP leadership race than I normally do. (And for those worried about missing out, note that we should have an opportunity to revisit new issues in detail as the debate schedule gets underway this weekend.)

Most significantly, Trent Wotherspoon released three new policy statements, covering the environment, health and the economy. Most of Wotherspoon's proposals can be safely classified as safe but effective statements of non-controversial policy within the NDP, but his small business tax proposals sets up what may be the first stark policy contrast of the campaign: where Erin Weir has suggested that corporate tax rates should be applied to more small business income in order to leave room for incentives for investment and hiring, Wotherspoon's economic plan proposes to eliminate corporate taxes altogether on earnings up to $100,000.

Weir also introduced his labour policy - which goes beyond restoring the law as it stood prior to the Saskatchewan Party's attacks on workers, but also includes additional steps to ensure that collective bargaining achieves fair results with a minimal amount of disruption:

He is calling for Saskatchewan to adopt legislation enabling either management or the union to apply for binding interest arbitration to resolve strikes or lock-outs that last more than 90 days. Such legislation has proven effective in Manitoba since it was enacted in 2004.
...
“Prohibiting replacement workers during legal strikes and lock-outs would also make these disputes less acrimonious,” said Weir. “Such anti-scab legislation would ensure that employers have an incentive to bargain in good faith rather than using replacements for 90 days until they can request arbitration.”
...
Weir would implement a construction tendering policy to prevent contractors from undercutting wages negotiated through the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council.

Weir also pointed out a spike in self-employment at the same time that actual jobs were lost in Saskatchewan - which at the very least raises serious questions as to whether the Sask Party is ensuring that a temporary boom provides as little security as possible for workers.

Ryan Meili responded to the Sask Party's liquor privatization plans with a focus on the social nature of problems caused by alcohol abuse (as found by the Parkland Institute and CCPA):

A couple of important points to keep in mind when weighing the government's recent actions:

Privatizing liquor sales leads to higher levels of alcohol consumption, which brings with it a host of social costs while increasing the burden on the health care and justice systems. Alberta, which became the first Canadian jurisdiction to privatize liquor sales in 1993, has the highest per-capita liquor consumption, while B.C., which began introducing private liquor stores in 2003, has higher-than-average consumption rates.

Private liquor stores replace quality, full-time jobs with low-paying, part-time jobs. "The studies agree there are more workers in liquor retail [in Alberta post-privatization], but they work fewer hours, have fewer benefits, and lower salaries than did Alberta government workers. So workers, by and large, are not better off."

Finally, Cam Broten offered his response to Scott's candidate questionnaire. And it's particularly interesting to contrast Broten's immediate priorities (which revolve entirely around party-building) against the policy issues he'd plan to tackle upon winning government. That hints at a noteworthy commitment to public engagement for its own sake on the path toward government - but may also provide fodder for the other candidates to question whether meaningful party-building is possible without highlighting issues as rallying points.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Lawrence Martin's take on Robocon doesn't offer much by way of new information, but nicely sums up exactly what deliberate vote suppression and electoral fraud should mean for a governing party:

At issue here is the legitimacy of the Conservative government. If the allegations are substantiated, they would arguably be worse than the sponsorship scandal that crippled the Liberal Party. Sponsorship was about lower-level Quebec operatives running off with the cash from a government advertising program to promote unity. Vote suppression is a campaign to throttle the workings of democracy by disenfranchising voters. It strikes at the heart of the democratic system.
...
A new Environics poll shows Mr. Harper’s trust ratings with the public to be among the lowest among leaders in a survey of 26 countries in the Americas. He can ill afford to have his party found culpable of running a campaign to disenfranchise opponents.

- Meanwhile, Democracy Watch highlights the need to close loopholes allowing big-money interests to influence our political system.

- Andrew Jackson points out some economic themes from Tom Mulcair which figure to help earn the trust of Canadian voters:

(T)he Conservatives are creating an economy where salaries will be much lower. There is less pressure with regard to all working conditions because of a series of measures that are being implemented. It is not by chance that, for the first time in Canada’s history, the middle class has seen a clear drop in income, and this occurred in tandem with the signing of NAFTA.

Over the past 25 years, the middle class has seen its real net income drop. This is the first time this has happened. In other words, the richest 20% of Canadians are experiencing a rise in income while the other 80% of Canadians—it has been measured and proven—are experiencing a drop in income. These are the results of the neo-conservative policies of the current government and its Liberal predecessors, who aggressively pursued the same goals for 25 years.

This is putting downward pressure on incomes and on employment conditions. As though that were not enough, these agreements are creating a race to the bottom: temporary foreign workers who used to come and work in a few sectors, such as produce farms, will now be in several employment categories. The government trumpets the fact that we can pay them a lot less than Canadians.
...
We need tailored incentives that better serve businesses and our economy as a whole. There are a couple of good examples that can be looked at in Canada where long-term vision and incentive by the government has produced a great result.

 

For example, take a look at the TV and film industry in Toronto. There used to be a time when it was only New York and Hollywood. Now, Toronto is in there competing with them every step of the way, but it required a partnership between government, business and labour. Those tax incentives were there for decades and they worked their way through the system and are producing the great result of bringing in billions of dollars a year and lots of high-quality jobs. However, it required government involvement every step of the way. The Conservatives simply do not believe in that.

 

We should be building the next success story now. Instead, we are getting less for workers, less for Canadians and less for our economy. That is what the Conservatives are about, less for everyone.

- Common Dreams compiles a few of the progressive arguments against another round of austerity south of the border.

- And finally, it'll be well worth keeping an eye on the Rolling Jubilee as a means of putting a dent in consumer debt.

Down the drain

There's rightly been plenty of debate over the Sask Party's recently-announced plan to decree that all future liquor stores in Saskatchewan will be privately-owned. But there looks to me to be room to take a closer look at exactly what Brad Wall is determined to give away - so let's take a back-of-the-envelope look at the profits we can expect to lose due to the gratuitous privatization of new liquor stores. (Numbers are from the SLGA Annual Report for 2012 (PDF).)

SLGA's liquor sales to the public (as opposed to sales to its franchisees) totalled $351,808.000 in 2011 (p. 45). Dividing that by the existing 51 stores, the effective sales per store are roughly $4,453,269.

The cost of liquor was roughly 49.4% of the subsequent sales price ($271,173,000/$549,454,000, from p. 26; I didn't see these numbers broken down by retail vs. franchise), while the cost of store operation was 11.9% of sales: p. 17.

That means that costs added up to 61.3% of the value of SLGA's retail sales. In turn 38.7% of the price of liquor from SLGA stores was pure profit for the people of Saskatchewan. And based on the per-store sales (which I'll generously assume wouldn't be any higher in booming areas than the average), for each store put in private hands rather than public ones, the province will lose out on $1,723,415 per year.

Of course, there would be a capital cost up front to build each store. But even allowing for rather generous building costs, the new stores would figure to pay for themselves within a few years - then produce returns many times over in the years to come.

And likewise, any residual income to the province from corporate taxes on private sales would figure to be dwarfed by the ample return SLGA is currently getting on its investment in retail stores.

Unfortunately, the Wall Saskatchewan Party isn't interested in the return to the province if it can find an excuse to shovel money into the private sector. And the province as a whole stands to lose tens of millions of dollars based on this ideological exercise alone.

[Edit: Fixed typo, wording.]

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Naomi Klein comments on how disaster capitalists have tried to turn Hurricane Sandy into a quick buck, while pointing out that there's a far more rational public policy response available:

The prize for shameless disaster capitalism, however, surely goes to rightwing economist Russell S Sobel, writing in a New York Times online forum. Sobel suggested that, in hard-hit areas, Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) should create "free-trade zones – in which all normal regulations, licensing and taxes [are] suspended". This corporate free-for-all would, apparently, "better provide the goods and services victims need".

Yes, that's right: this catastrophe, very likely created by climate change – a crisis born of the colossal regulatory failure to prevent corporations from treating the atmosphere as their open sewer – is just one more opportunity for further deregulation. And the fact that this storm has demonstrated that poor and working-class people are far more vulnerable to the climate crisis shows that this is clearly the right moment to strip those people of what few labour protections they have left, as well as to privatise the meagre public services available to them. Most of all, when faced with an extraordinarily costly crisis born of corporate greed, hand out tax holidays to corporations.

The flurry of attempts to use Sandy's destructive power as a cash grab is just the latest chapter in the very long story I have called the The Shock Doctrine. And it is but the tiniest glimpse into the ways large corporations are seeking to reap enormous profits from climate chaos.
...
Just as the Great Depression and the second world war launched movements that claimed as their proud legacies social safety nets across the industrialised world, so climate change can be a historic occasion to usher in the next great wave of progressive change. Moreover, none of the anti-democratic trickery I described in The Shock Doctrine is necessary to advance this agenda. Far from seizing on the climate crisis to push through unpopular policies, our task is to seize upon it to demand a truly populist agenda.

The reconstruction from Sandy is a great place to start road testing these ideas. Unlike the disaster capitalists who use crisis to end-run democracy, a People's Recovery (as many from the Occupy movement are already demanding) would call for new democratic processes, including neighbourhood assemblies, to decide how hard-hit communities should be rebuilt. The overriding principle must be addressing the twin crises of inequality and climate change at the same time. For starters, that means reconstruction that doesn't just create jobs but jobs that pay a living wage. It means not just more public transit, but energy-efficient, affordable housing along those transit lines. It also means not just more renewable power, but democratic community control over those projects.

But at the same time as we ramp up alternatives, we need to step up the fight against the forces actively making the climate crisis worse. 

 - Barbara Yaffe highlights the influence Canada's First Nations figure to have on resource development - as the constitutional duty to consult means they'll have a sound basis to challenge the Harper Cons' attempts to run over anybody who questions putting tar sands profits above all else.

- And in case there was any doubt whether many Canadians will accept Harper's spin unquestioned, Environics provides the answer...

(O)nly 16 per cent of Canadians place “a lot of trust” in their Prime Minister, putting Stephen Harper near the bottom among all leaders in the Americas.

“In an international context, Harper has a lower level of trust than almost every other national leader in the hemisphere,” Mr. Neuman said.

- Finally, Thomas Edsall writes about how Republicans lost the U.S. culture war. But Tom Tomorrow rightly questions whether they'll realize it anytime soon.

Sunday Afternoon 'Rider Blogging

Since I haven't had a chance to post after the Saskatchewan Roughriders' last two (mostly meaningless) regular-season games, I'll quickly preview today's West semi-final in Calgary.

To start with, it's always an open question as to whether Darian Durant can put together a virtuoso performance - and he's certainly managed the feat in the playoffs before against more distinguished defences than the one he'll face today. But the 'Riders offence has been at best consistent rather than explosive over the latter half of the 2012 season - and I'd hope the team won't need a 35-point outburst to stay in the game against the Stampeders.

That means the most important matchup should involve the greatest strength for each team: a Calgary offence built around two of the toughest players in the CFL to tackle, facing a Richie Hall defence built around limiting running room for opposing offences. And John Hufnagel has only raised the stakes by inserting Drew Tate at quarterback, trading off Kevin Glenn's well-honed passing skills for a quarterback with more ability to rack up yards on the ground.

While I wouldn't be brave enough to predict a Saskatchewan win based on that showdown, the 'Riders have risen to the occasion before - particularly by meeting a challenge to shut down Cornish in their previous meeting with the Stamps. And it'll likely take a repeat performance to give the 'Riders the upper hand today.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Haroon Siddiqui highlights the similarities between the Harper Cons and the U.S. Republicans - who lost last week's election, and are even less popular outside their country's own borders (including in Canada):

(W)hat Americans have rejected, Canadians are stuck with at least until the next election.

Americans did so with 51 per cent of the votes cast. Canadians did it with 60 per cent in the last election, Harper having formed the government with 40 per cent. That’s our parliamentary democracy. Still, it’s useful to remind ourselves of his policies that are not in sync with majority Canadian opinion but mesh with those of Romney and the Republicans.

He and they advocate smaller government and lower taxes, deficits and debts. But they believe in pork barrelling, milking government dry for their favoured projects. They also spend big on the military. That leads to bigger deficits and debts, as under George W. Bush and Harper (forcing the prime minister to now start cutting back on defence).

The Harper Conservatives and Romney Republicans don’t like gun controls or environmental regulations. They are oblivious to growing inequality. They treat adversaries as enemies — if you’re not with Harper, you are to be demonized, ideally destroyed.

 - Meanwhile, Ezra Klein notes that the Republicans actually lost the popular vote in all three national votes last week - holding the House of Representatives only through gerrymandering. Matthew Yglesias points out why the Republicans have no leverage at all to insist on extending the upper-class-only tax cuts rejected by voters. And Time discusses the data-driven campaign that helped to re-elect Barack Obama.

- Kev laments the sad state of all too many backbench MPs in Canada (even as some want to silence them even more). But then, the regina mom observes that plenty of constituents aren't missing much based on the caliber of Con MP they're stuck with.

- Finally, CBC reports that Mennonites are the latest group under attack by the federal government for daring to speak out for their values.

On executive decisions

My post yesterday on the Senate's choice to remind Canadians of its existence by blocking a bill passed by the House of Commons has sparked plenty of discussion. But I'll highlight one of the more stunning arguments being made in favour of the Senate's actions.

Here's Dale Smith in his own comments section:

The Senate is almost never going to turn down a budget bill because they’re confidence measures, and the Senate is not a confidence chamber.

And another commenter, James Bowden, in more stark terms:

There is no legitimate constitutional argument why the Senate should not be able to kill this private members’ bill. It is certainly not a matter of confidence and did not require the royal recommendation. The Senate poses no threat to the primacy of the Commons by voting against a frivolous private members’ bill.

So the pro-Senate line is that a private members' bill which happens to win the support of a majority of elected members can be killed without any reason to think twice - just so long it's the result of mere elected MPs debating and voting on a bill on their own, rather than the approval of the executive branch. (And the fact that the bill under discussion didn't receive a lot of debate has everything to do with the reality that very little time is allocated to private members' business compared to government business.)

By that account, the limits of Senatorial authority would be seen to begin and end with a declaration that a bill is a priority for the sitting government (as a budget or confidence measure). Which looks to me to entrench all the more power in the hands of the PMO - even as the Harper Cons have given us nothing but reason to worry about the control our current executive exercises over both MPs as a matter of party discipline, and parliamentary procedures as a matter of preventing inconvenient votes.

Suffice it to say I consider it rather questionable that a constitutional relic intended to limit democratic decision-making from day one should be accepted as a reason to treat the legislative process in the House of Commons as being no more significant in deciding on the fate of a law which meets with the disapproval of a chamber of appointed hacks than a straw poll of the Parliamentary kitchen staff. And if our goal is to make sure that MPs do their jobs better, we'll accomplish far more by asking them to justify their their actions directly than by declaring that we're just fine seeing their work rendered meaningless by unelected Senators.

On questionable advice

Shorter Zach Paikin:

In order to avoid the fate of the Ignatieff Libs, the NDP should totally abandon any principles and re-run Ignatieff's "we stand for nothing, but at least we're not that guy!" campaign.

Saturday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Andrew Jackson takes a look at the UK's strong movement for a living wage, and notes that it's long past time for a similar push in Canada.

- The most remarkable part of this week's revelations about the Cons' cuts to refugee health is their apparent position that they're required to slash funding without consultation in the name of "budget secrecy", rather than talking to anybody to determine what programs are needed.

- And one has to figure that if the Cons thought they could talk to anybody rather than imposing decisions from on high, they'd know better than to waste some of the money they're burning on self-promotion and other questionable priorities.

- Meanwhile, the Cons' determination to make policy without adequate information is all the more obvious as they insist on unregulated tar-sands development while recognizing that we're starting from scratch in studying the cumulative impact of the industry.

- Finally, Tabatha Southey observes that if U.S. Republicans want to survive as a viable contender for power, they may need to both accept evolution and facilitate its application to their own development:

But the increasingly emaciated Republican Party remains maladapted to this new environment. Not all that enthusiastic about sex, able to dine on only a single and declining resource, the GOP faithful basically just amble about in this changed ecosystem, like so many political pandas cursed to live in an era of not very much bamboo.

The response from Republican supporters to their party’s plight is almost heartwarming. Many of the GOP have spent hours painstakingly bottle-feeding abandoned Republicans until they’re ready to restate their skepticism about climate change – sometimes washing oil into the feathers of conservative congressmen, in the hopes of making them more appealing to voters.
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Some days, it’s hard not to feel for Charles and David Koch. The Koch brothers are the Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall of endangered conservatives. But by attempting to turn America into a giant Republican Party preservation park, they may be standing in the way of actual evolution – a process that involves natural selection, change compatible with reality, and letting go.

(Right now, the Republican Party has vestigial birthers, for example, and that is a problem for them.)

Musical interlude

Wide Mouth Mason - Sugarcane

On unwanted imports

The Mound of Sound is rightly appalled at the revelation that JP Morgan is making money off of the U.S.' food stamp program.

But lest we think the problem is limited to our neighbours, let's note that the Cons are doing their utmost to ensure that every social ill turns into a source of corporate profits on our side of the border as well:

(Diane) Finley has repeatedly rebuffed pleas for a national approach to housing and poverty, arguing that the federal government is not best placed to deal with issues that often have local nuances.

But at the same time, since the federal government provides significant funding for affordable housing, homelessness initiatives and other key social programs, Ottawa is deeply implicated in social policy whether it likes it or not.

Finley suggested she was frustrated with the lack of progress in social programs [ed note: of the type which her party has consistently refused to support], and wants to dramatically re-arrange the system...

And that re-arrangement means...

“Social finance is about mobilizing private capital to achieve social goals, creating opportunities for investors to finance projects that benefit Canadians and realize financial gains,” the government said in a statement announcing the financing mechanism.

So as far as the Cons are concerned, the main problem with poverty in Canada is that the financial sector hasn't yet figured out how to make enough money off of it. And absent some significant pushback, we can fully expect that the JP Morgan example will pale in comparison to what we'll end up paying to turn citizens' dire needs into corporate profits.

On bad bets

It's been glaringly obvious to those of us paying attention that the Cons have set up plenty of means to keep dictating the terms of Canadian politics from beyond the political grave - with the most obvious being their continued stacking of the Senate which will put at least a formal roadblock in the way of any future government for many years to come.

As a result, any opposition party with an ounce of foresight would know better than to send the message that unelected Senators should consider themselves free to overrule elected Members of Parliament - particularly when a bill has been passed unanimously among the representatives chosen by Canadian voters.

Unfortunately, the Libs' legacy Senate appointments still seem happy to show the short-sightedness that's decimated their party as an electoral force. And if we don't see an immediate move from the Libs' few remaining elected representatives to reverse that position, the result may be to tighten the Harper Cons' grip on power even past their removal from office.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Rick Salutin offers an important take on the U.S. election by pointing out that the Occupy movement and its focus on inequality laid the groundwork for Barack Obama's re-election:

The aftermath to the bailouts was the real revelation: the bailed-out were graceless and unrepentant. They resisted any similar help for the majority. Obama played along. His stimulus program was mild, like his aid to stressed homeowners. Books such as The Spirit Level (2010) pointed to the swelling damage but it was just a book. Then came Occupy Wall Street in the fall of 2011, with its slogan about the 1 per cent versus the 99 per cent. It resonated because it jibed with what people saw and experienced. It entered mass awareness. Occupy didn’t discover the gap, but they put it out where it could get political traction.

Obama’s “strategists” noticed. They were worried with an election coming and no serious recovery for anyone but the rich. Rising inequality began appearing in his speeches. Even Republicans noticed. They went from calling Occupy a mob, to saying they too fretted over “income disparity.” Obama’s own renditions of the theme were, I’d say, unenthusiastic, culminating in his listless performance at the first debate. Then, ironically, his competitiveness kicked in, he picked up his game, and went on to Tuesday’s victory.

But none of it would have worked, had Republicans not nominated the embodiment of Mr. One Per Cent, Mitt Romney. He likes firing people. He thinks 47 per cent of Americans are irresponsible takers. He parks his money abroad and won’t release his tax returns. All he lacks is a top hat and he surely has one in one of his homes. But the attacks, in turn, wouldn’t have taken, had Occupy not already poured the mould for Romney with its “1 per cent” trope.

- Paul Krugman makes the case as to why Obama shouldn't get bullied into letting the Republicans dictate the terms of a budget deal after winning a second mandate. [Update: See also Scott Lemieux' concise take.]

- Bob Hepburn points out that Mitt Romney's campaign strategy featured plenty of anti-democratic tricks which the Harper Cons might seek to emulate. But given that all the employer intimidation, false robocalls and vote suppression couldn't actually tilt the election Romney's way, I'd think there's reason for even the most craven Con to be skeptical that the Republicans' model is really worth following.

- Meanwhile, the Cons already have to answer for plenty of campaign deception. And Saskboy draws some important links between the latest word from Robocon fall-guy Michael Sona and the evidence that's already public as to the connection between the Cons' CIMS database and the calls placed into multiple ridings.

- Finally, pogge wonders why former Con cabinet minister Chuck Strahl is being handed another patronage appointment when the public record shows him having done nothing in what should be an important role with the Security Intelligence Review Committee.

New column day

Here, on how the Republicans' electoral strategy once again included a failed attempt to prioritize fossil fuels over mere people - and how the Harper Cons look to be on the verge of making the same mistake.

For further reading on the developing resource debate in Canada, see in particular Paul Wells' repeated observations about the Cons' strategy, and my initial reaction. And you'll find plenty more worth reading about the U.S.' campaign through the U.S. Blogs links to the right - with commentary from Josh Marshall, Jed Lewison, Erik Loomis and Tom Junod particularly deserving a look.

[Edit: fixed typo.]

On lemmings

No, we shouldn't be surprised that Jim Flaherty is lending the weight of Canada's federal government to a concerted effort to attack U.S. social programs. But for those who may have missed it, the supposed "fiscal cliff" being used as an excuse to push a lame-duck Congress to cut long-term benefits is rather less urgent than advertised.

Here's Matt Yglesias on why the "cliff" metaphor is utterly misplaced:

A salient fact about non-metaphorical cliffs is that falling over them is generally irreversible. If the cliff is high enough that falling off of it would kill you, then if you fall off you're going to die and that's the end of it. The "fiscal cliff" by contrast isn't like that at all.

Rather, it's a set of policy changes—mostly tax hikes plus some steep spending cuts—that if they were all locked into place would constitute a significant drag on economic growth over the course of a year. But if the Bush tax cuts fully expire on a Tuesday morning it's not as if some catastrophe strikes on Wednesday where suddenly middle class families have no money. It's true that if the new higher rates were to be locked in, then the medium-term drag on middle class take home pay would delay the deleveraging cycle and damage the recovery. But to resolve that, all you need to do is introduce a new package of middle class tax cuts on Wednesday afternoon, have congress pass it on Thursday, and then the president signs it on Friday. The fact that taxes were higher for three days—or even three weeks—is simply not that consequential.

Obviously to the extent that higher middle class taxes is bad, one day of them is worse than zero days and three days is worse than one day. But it's a deeply banal situation. There's no particularly large virtue to "averting" the fiscal cliff on Day N-3 versus "going over the fiscal cliff" and then fixing it in retrospect on Day N+3. If "going over the cliff" gives the White House leverage to lock a better medium-term fiscal policy in place, then going over the cliff is a no brainer. Because there is no cliff.

And likewise, Suzy Khimm points out that the primary significance of the January deadline is that it will temporarily withdraw some stimulus from the U.S. economy - meaning that there's no reason whatsoever to allow Republicans to hold long-term social spending hostage or insist that wealthy Americans pay disproportionately low taxes as the price of agreement.

As Yglesias notes, some sort of deal will eventually be needed to avoid having longer-term effects take hold. (And there may well be more reason for optimism now than in the last couple of Republican efforts at crisis-making, as at least nobody can point to limiting Barack Obama's time in office as a basis for courting disaster.)

But we should be highly skeptical of Flaherty and anybody else focusing primarily on an immediate deal rather than a reasonable one - lest we otherwise encourage the Republicans to herd the U.S. toward real dangers.

[Edit: Fixed formatting.]

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Barbara Yaffe writes about the continual rise in food bank use and the underlying political choices which have brought it about:

(I)n the last decade food banks have been helping Canadians through both good times and bad.

Doubtless, the latest food bank numbers, at least in part, are related to the private-sector propensity since the 2008 recession to maintain or boost profit by reducing employee numbers.

Also, as anyone who frequents a supermarket knows, food has grown noticeably more expensive in the past few years.

And Canadians are more indebted.

The public sector also is being constricted, with the robustness of social programs being diminished.

“As governments cut the size of the public workforce, emphasize low taxes and restrict new spending, social policy ... is at risk of neglect.”

 - Gus Van Harten reviews how FIPA investment deal with China being forced through by the Cons looks to have disastrous effects for Canada. And Rick Mercer rants about the Cons' refusal to accept debate or accountability on the deal:


- Amy Minsky has been reporting extensively on the Cons' anti-union bill - first highlighting the dishonesty involved in labeling the bill as a private member's legislation when Stephen Harper's own chief of staff has been documented meeting with the anti-worker lobbyists behind it, then covering the resulting committee hearings.

- And finally, Michael Harris discusses how direct interference by the Cons has led to the termination and silencing of journalists who dare to question their actions rather than serving as meek stenographers.

On delayed releases

I'll have plenty to catch up on over the next few days. But I'll start by pointing out the background behind what's become one of the most-discussed stories of the past week on the Saskatchewan political scene.

It's well and good that we've eventually learned the results of the report from the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce and SaskFilm showing just how much return we get from investing in the film industry.

But a week ago, that report was still being hidden from public view by the parties who commissioned it. And it took a public challenge from NDP MLA Danielle Chartier to both determine who had the authority to release the report, and make sure that the facts were eventually made public - notwithstanding that the contents were apparently known to the government a month earlier:

Culture Minister Kevin Doherty said the study, which was commissioned by the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce and Sask-Film, was presented to him about a month ago during a meeting that also included representation from the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Industry Association.

"What the report shows is that there is an economic benefit to the province of Saskatchewan from the film industry," Doherty told reporters on Monday at the Legislative Building after question period, during which the issue was raised by NDP culture critic Danielle Chartier.

Chartier said she has heard the study shows the net cost to taxpayers from the old refundable film employment tax credit was less than the $1 million per year budgeted by the government for its new, non-refundable replacement.

And that sequence of events raises more than a few questions. For example, would we ever have heard about the actual costs of the Sask Party's decision if Chartier hadn't heard about - and raised - the issue? Why did the parties who commissioned the report choose not to let the public in on a matter of public concern? And how much more information about the negative effects of Saskatchewan Party policies is being similarly withheld from the public?