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By: Andrew Stevens | First published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on May 3, 2013: Sweeping changes to Saskatchewan’s labour relations and employment standards legislation are on the verge of being passed. Bill 85, the Saskatchewan Employment Act, will dramatically transform the laws governing trade unions and industrial relations in the province. The [...] The post Saskatchewan: A beachhead of labour law reform? appeared first on The Canadian Progressive. By: Andrew Stevens | First published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on May 3, 2013: Sweeping changes to Saskatchewan’s labour relations and employment standards legislation are on the verge of being passed. Bill 85, the Saskatchewan Employment Act, will dramatically transform the laws governing trade unions and industrial relations in the province. The [...] The post Saskatchewan: A beachhead of labour law reform? appeared first on The Canadian Progressive. Assorted content for your weekend reading. - Armine Yalnizyan makes the case as to why wealth equates to far too much power in Canada: The problem is not that the wealthy are too powerful. The problem is that, with rare exception, as their power has increased, it has not been matched by an increase in their sense of responsibility. On the contrary, the wealthy have been using their power for decades to reduce their responsibilities to anyone but themselves. The litany, en bref: Taxes are too high. Governments are too big. There are too many rules. Workers feel way too (Read more…) Miscellaneous material to start your week. - As would-be frackers show us exactly why it’s dangerous to give the corporate sector a veto over government action, Steven Shrybman suggests that corporations are mostly doing only what we’d expect in exploiting agreements designed to prioritize profits over people: Canadian businesses are simply playing by the rules of free trade which encourages the outsourcing of everthing that isn’t glued to the local Tim Hortons or the tar sands (to cite two prominent examples): that means value-added processing (where the jobs are) of natural resources that are simply ripped and shipped to the (Read more…) This and that for your Tuesday reading. - The Broadbent Institute’s “Union Communities, Healthy Communities” report discusses the significance of the labour movement in achieving positive social outcomes. And Rick Smith concurrently writes that the right’s attacks on unions represent a solution in search of a problem: (W)hen unions are strong, the gains that they make for their members in terms of decent wages and benefits spill over into non-union workplaces. In the face of Canadian conservatives trying to portray unions as some kind of impediment to economic growth and productivity, actually examining this empirical evidence is instructive. Economists agree (Read more…) the rapidly rising share of all income going to the top 1% in the US and Canada since the early 1980s is explained in significant part by declining unionization. US-style de-unionization would clearly make Canada a much more unequal society than is already the case. And . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links Perhaps I’m a bit late to the party, but this is an issue that I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about since it was mentioned. In the past few weeks, an issue that wasn’t on anyone’s radar made its way to the forefront of everyone’s minds when Cam Broten rose in the legislature to ask the Premier and the Minister of Education about the existence of Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) in Saskatchewan schools. Brad Wall gave the standard right wing boiler plate warning of ensuring religious tolerance and freedoms were protected, while Russ Marchuk has tried to say (Read more…) there is currently no legislation that prevent GSAs from being formed in schools across Saskatchewan. Brad Wall further embarrassed himself, and Cam Broten rightly called him out on it, when in the media scrum afterwards the Premier seemed unable to bring himself to even say the word ‘gay’. . . . → Read More: Canadian Political Viewpoints: The "Rebel" Alliance CBC reports some of the numbers surrounding the Wall government’s planned giveaway of the majority of Saskatchewan’s Information Service Corporation. But let’s take a closer look at exactly what Wall intends to do – and what the province is losing in the process. Let’s make the generous assumption that a share sale will result in the higher valuation mooted by Don McMorris. Conveniently, that would mean that a 60% share of ISC would cost $120 million – establishing a nice, round $200 million valuation for ISC as a whole. At the moment, the roughly $20 million in annual profits would (Read more…) that Saskatchewan’s citizens are getting a 10% return on our ownership of ISC. Which, needless to say, represents an absolutely stellar return on capital compared to any evaluation of borrowing costs or normal rates of profit – something to be preserved, not to be discarded at the first . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On giveaways Sure, we know that an undue obsession with standardized testing leads to incentives for administrators and teachers to cheat in order to give the impression of improvement. But that’s nothing compared to the impact on other parts of a child’s eduction which get shoved aside in the name of test scores: At Public School 10 on the edge of Park Slope, Brooklyn, parents begged the principal to postpone the lower school science fair, insisting it was going to add too much pressure while they were preparing their children for the coming state tests. On Staten Island, a community meeting devolved . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Someday, this could all be ours Here, on how the Wall government is extending purely individual rights such as the right to privacy to corporations – and how that could lead to yet more corporate abuse in the future. For further reading…- The Hansard record from March 18 featuring Gord Wyant’s approval of corporate secrecy in the name of civil libertarianism is here (PDF, starting at p. 2747). – The Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner’s letter to Wyant questioning the “company’s privacy” language (among other parts of Bill 65) is here (PDF).- The Supreme Court of Canada’s seminal decision on the quasi-constitutional . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: New column day Alison Redford’s approval ratings have fallen to “Stelmachian” levels Angus Reid has released their quarterly Premier approval ratings. As per usual, Brad Wall is more popular than God, and everyone else is a little more human: Wall (SK): 64% approve, 28% disapprove Alward (NB): 41% approve, 50% disapprove Selinger (MB): 38% approve, 49% disapprove Wynne (ON): 36% approve, 37% disapprove Marois (QC): 33% approve, 62% disapprove Dexter (NS): 30% approve, 62% disapprove Redford (AB): 29% approve, 66% disapprove Clark (BC): 25% approve, 67% disapprove Dunderdale (NL): 25% approve, 73% disapprove While Wall’s number sticks out, there are a few . . . → Read More: Calgary Grit: Provincial Unrest Lest anybody see the high-profile Atlanta example of standardized testing fraud as an isolated incident, Valerie Strauss writes about how Sask Party-style mandatory testing has produced similar problems across the U.S.: In the past four academic years, test cheating has been confirmed in 37 states and Washington D.C. (You can see details here, and, here, a list of more than 50 ways that schools can manipulate test scores.) The true extent of these scandals remain unknown, and, as Michael Winerip of The New York Times shows here in this excellent article, it is very hard . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On impending failures Yesiree, frequent standardized testing sure does help teachers focus on what’s most important… Ms. Parks admitted to Mr. Hyde that she was one of seven teachers — nicknamed “the chosen” — who sat in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, raising students’ scores by erasing wrong answers and making them right. She then agreed to wear a hidden electronic wire to school, and for weeks she secretly recorded the conversations of her fellow teachers for Mr. Hyde. In the two and a half years since, the state’s investigation reached from Ms. Parks’s third-grade classroom . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Someday, this could all be ours This and that for your Tuesday reading. - Ruy Teixeira discusses Branko Milanovic’s finding that on a global scale, income inequality is almost entirely locked in based on an individual’s place of birth and parents’ income: Milanovic asks “How much of your income is determined at birth?” The answer: 80 percent of your income can be accounted for by the country of your birth and the income level of your parents. That leaves just 20 percent for age, sex, race, luck and, of course, hard work. Wow. In the final section of his book, Milanovic looks at . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links Here, on how Brad Wall’s willingness to see the long form census scrapped suggests that his government’s push toward mandatory annual standardized tests for all students can’t be explained by any real interest in evidence-based policy – and how the move looks to damage students’ education in substance rather than providing any useful information. For further reading…- Wall’s position on the census is discussed here, as he helped to block any agreement among Canada’s premiers on trying to reverse the shredding of the long form census.- Emma Graney’s initial report on the Sask Party’s mandatory testing . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Slightly Aged Column Day TweetThe rhetoric is running high this week with President Barack Obama expected to soon decide the fate of the controversial TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline. In Washington D.C. last week, federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair criticized the pipeline that would ship bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands to refineries in Texas. Mr. Mulcair also took the opportunity to criticize [...] Assorted content for your weekend reading. - Jason Fekete reports on the growing recognition that tax evasion and avoidance are serious global problems – and the Cons’ attempt to be seen nodding at the issues. Needless to say, that posturing would be far more plausible if the same Cons weren’t simultaneously announcing their intention to slash the Canada Revenue Agency’s enforcement capability even further (in keeping with their past moves to attack the CRA). - Meanwhile, the fallout from Peter Penashue’s acceptance of illegal corporate campaign donations continues. And it’s well worth highlighting the fact that the financial agent . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links Here, on how Brad Wall’s first set of utterly implausible attacks on Cam Broten seems to reflect a failure to learn from the mistakes of the Saskatchewan Party’s Republican cousins. For further reading (and a quick response to the spin), Broten’s policy development proposal is here. *This post has been amended from it’s original content, due to SK NDP Leader Cam Broten coming out in favour of Keystone; the ** denotes the area where the editing begins.Source: Star Phoenix: Broten Clarifies Stance on Pipeline Source: Huffington Post: Brad Wall Accuses Thomas Mulcair Of ‘Betraying’ Keystone, Oilsands Now, getting back into the swing of things with the leadership race over. I think we’re going to keep the labels, as they should make the blog a bit more easy to move through, but other than that there shouldn’t be any other major changes. While the provincial NDP (Read more…) Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. - Tim Harper reminds us why Brad Wall is thoroughly off base in claiming that it’s the duty of every Canadian politician to demonstrate constant fealty to his resource-sector puppet-masters: The Conservatives, of course, would like the entire country to come together behind their view of resource extraction, but the nice thing about democracy is it accommodates dissonant voices. Keystone faces credible and determined opposition in both countries. There is a longstanding protocol in the U.S. that politicians do not criticize the government while abroad, but if that ever was the convention in . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links Shorter Brad Wall: Of course neither Stephen Harper nor any of his provincial mini-petro-states has any interest in actually dealing with climate change. But as long as we rev up our PR machine to claim otherwise, surely Barack Obama will be none the wiser. The work (PDF) of the Saskatchewan Election Study in analyzing public views of unions is worth a read generally. But it’s particularly worth noting that the element of union activity which the public considers to be most valuable is also the part facing the most regular attacks from Brad Wall and his corporate boosters. Here’s Loleen Berdahl and David McGrane on the comparative views of different union roles: In so far as people perceive unions as narrowly defending the interests of their own members, the public reaction is negative. Indeed, almost three in five (58.1 per cent) respondents feel . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On social roles Saskatchewan Minister of Energy and Resources Tim McMillan has seen fit to respond to last week’s column on Keystone XL and its connection to climate policy. But it’s well worth noting that McMillan’s argument looks to fall short on a few fronts. Let’s start with the fact that McMillan doesn’t even pretend to refute my concerns that his government has done absolutely nothing on climate change over a period of years. (Which hardly serves to address the genuine concern from the Obama administration that the Canadian voices lobbying for Keystone XL have no interest whatsoever in meaningful climate change policy. . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: The Education of Tim McMillan Leftdog has already weighed in on one key connection to be drawn based on the latest news about the siphoning of money from a supposed attempt to toward insiders with a sole-sourced deal to provide computers at inflated prices. But let’s look at a couple more points arising out of the story. All of this seems to contradict what Donna Harpauer, the government minister responsible, told the NDP Opposition last June. “The contract cost was within the acceptable range for similar goods and services and the goods and services were necessary,” Harpauer said at the time. Now, Harpauer says she . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On responsibility Here, on Brad Wall’s off-key lobbying against action on climate change – and why we should see the bright side of having the Obama administration push us toward more sound environmental policy when far too many Canadian leaders have failed in their responsibilities. For further reading…- Wall’s simultaneous lobbying for automatic pipeline approval and against any further Canadian action on climate change can be found here (see in particular the video clip to the right) and here.- Jeffrey Simpson and Tzeporah Berman have made similar points about the value of the U.S.’ message linking Canadian . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: New column day Brad Wall’s contrived outrage over foreign interference in domestic policy might be a bit less laughable if he didn’t make so much of a show of trying to dictate the U.S.’ own decisions. [Edit: fixed wording.] |
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