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By Greg Fingas, on February 26, 2013, at 9:53 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- Michael Harris rightly points out that a steady stream of scandals and incompetence from the Cons says plenty about Stephen Harper’s own judgment (or lack thereof): Sooner or later, the country is going to realize that there is something terribly wrong with Stephen Harper’s judgment.
And sooner or later, the Conservative party is going to realize one-man bands are great until the tuba player runs out of breath.
At the moment, judged only by his record in Senate appointments, Harper’s eye for talent appears to be made of glass.
Patrick Brazeau and
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 24, 2013, at 10:29 am That and that for your Sunday reading.
- Alex Himelfarb weighs in against gratuitous austerity by pointing out the dishonest cycle of excuses used to push destructive policy: (T)he consequences of cuts are increasingly visible, first for the most vulnerable: aboriginal communities struggling to meet basic needs, higher tuitions and student debt, refugees who cannot get needed medicine, more unemployed Canadians thrown onto inadequate welfare because they cannot access insurance. Some consequences will play out more slowly: weaker environmental regulations, cuts to education and science, neglect of crumbling infrastructure, eroding public services will all make our economy less competitive, less
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 25, 2013, at 8:44 am Assorted content for your Friday reading.
- In addition to providing my latest tagline, Alex Himelfarb takes aim at the austerians who seem happy to attack social well-being and economic development alike in the name of government-slashing: (A)usterity had never been driven by fiscal policy or economics or evidence. It was driven by ideology. Market fundamentalism. A desire to make government much smaller, eliminate or reduce, as much as politics allowed, so-called entitlements, create a “pro-business” climate of less regulation, less government, and, above all, lower taxes.
Think about the irony of this: that the huge recession-induced deficits
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 3, 2013, at 9:56 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Barbara Yaffe lets Hugh Segal make the case for a guaranteed annual income to end poverty in Canada: (Hugh Segal) says it could be arranged by way of a tax credit through the income tax system, to top up income of anyone falling below Statistics Canada’s Low Income Cutoff (LICO).
LICO for a single person is about $22,200; for a family with three children, roughly $47,000.
“In other words,” writes Segal, “being poor would become a problem we all buffered in the same way as we buffer all Canadians relative to health
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
By Lorne, on January 3, 2013, at 9:02 am Shakespeare purists will perhaps forgive my titular, out-of-context paraphrasing of a famous line from Hamlet, but it occurred to me yesterday and today as I read two fine essays published in The Toronto Star.
The first, by former Globe writer Michael Valpy (strange how that ‘newspaper of record’ has either lost or terminated so many good writers in the past decade), appeared in yesterday’s edition. Entitled Canada’s new politics of discord could carry a heavy price, it reflects on the implications of the breakdown in Canadian social cohesion both promoted and exploited by the Harper government as it works
. . . → Read More: Politics and its Discontents: To Read, Perchance To Think
By Greg Fingas, on October 10, 2012, at 9:17 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- No, the aftershocks of an e. coli outbreak which has unfortunately given both Canadians and export markets reason for concern about the safety of some of our major food sources aren’t about to end simply because the Cons are again pretending everything’s fine. And the president of the union local representing XL Foods workers points out one of the major steps needed to ensure problems aren’t allowed to fester due to managerial neglect: Under the UFCW’s collective agreement, O’Halloran said, line workers can inform a supervisor only if they spot a safety issue,
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
By Lorne, on October 10, 2012, at 9:12 am I have written two previous posts about Alex Himelfarb, Director of the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs at York University, former Clerk of the Privy Council, and fellow blogger. He is a man whose passion for democracy and societal fairness I deeply admire.
I was therefore pleased to see him sharing his thoughts on the state of our democracy in today’s Star as part of a series that began yesterday with a piece by Allan Gregg entitled In Defence of Reason.
Today, Himelfarb begins with an observation with which I think most of us would agree:
We ought
. . . → Read More: Politics and its Discontents: ‘Where Is The Outrage?’ Asks Alex Himelfarb
By Lorne, on September 2, 2012, at 9:17 am Now here is something everyone who wants to be well-informed should watch. Part of TVO’s Big Ideas series, it is a talk entitled How Did Taxes Become a Bad Word? by Alex Himelfarb, Director of the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs at York University, former Clerk of the Privy Council, and fellow blogger.
Unlike the strident and largely irrational hysterics of the right who preach salvation through tax cuts, Himelfarb offers us a carefully reasoned argument about how to achieve greater equality and the kind of society that all of us, in our better moments, hope for.
I
. . . → Read More: Politics and its Discontents: Why Fair Taxation Is Crucial
By Greg Fingas, on July 5, 2012, at 7:16 pm Assorted content to end your day.
- For those wondering what might become of Nathan Cullen’s leadership campaign plan to work with progressives of all party stripes, we now have part of the answer: in advance of the Calgary Centre by-election, Cullen will be reaching out to discuss how to challenge the Cons.
- Jim Stanford highlights rankings of corporate size showing just how dependent Canada already is on the finance and resource sectors – a problem which the Cons are of course determined to exacerbate.
- Meanwhile, Sarah Jaffe points out what I’m sure is only a purely
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
By Lorne, on May 30, 2012, at 8:22 am The other day I wrote a post about detecting patterns in political behaviour, opining that most media spend a disproportionate amount of their considerable resources covering trivia like celebrity gossip and acting as shallow and lazy supporters of government propaganda. The Toronto Star, I asserted, is one of the few exceptions in the world of newspapers.
Despite my feelings of repugnance toward The Globe and Mail, they still have at least one journalist who writes and thinks independently: Lawrence Martin. Yesterday, in a piece entitled The time has come for a progressive revival, Martin, drawing upon the work of
. . . → Read More: Politics and its Discontents: A Journalist Writes About A Pattern
By Greg Fingas, on April 17, 2012, at 6:56 pm This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- Alex Himelfarb laments the Cons’ dismantling of a progressive state in Canada. But lest we lose all hope, Annie Lowrey reports on the Piketty/Saez economic work that’s paving the way for fairer taxes in the U.S. And Kelly McParland has to admit that more progressive taxes are entirely supported by the public even as he registers his disapproval for having the wealthy pay a fair share.
- Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher report that Robocon has predictably been traced back to the Cons’ central campaign. And Sixth Estate looks in more
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
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