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By Greg Fingas, on May 24, 2013, at 9:46 am Assorted content to end your week.
- For all the talk of fraud and cover-ups among the Cons this week, the most important story on that front looks to be the release of Judge Mosley’s decision on Robocon – featuring findings of fact based on the best evidence presented by the Cons (and affected voters) that the 2011 election was marred by electoral fraud facilitated by the Cons’ voter database, and that the first Cons covered it up by destroying the records which would have allowed investigators to determine who was actually responsible, then engaged in questionable tactics to keep (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 22, 2013, at 11:24 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Pat Steenberg observes that the Harper Cons’ deficits are the result of conscious choices to reduce government revenue – and that we can fix our deficit and rein in inequality at the same time by reversing the damage: (W)hen our governments say they can no longer afford something, what they are really saying is that “we” cannot afford it. But is this really the case?
Canada’s average GDP per capita — the value of total productive output divided by the population that produced it — has continued to grow, with a few minor (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 21, 2013, at 11:02 am Let’s once again take a slightly closer look at what’s been reported about the Cons’ senate scandal – as yesterday’s revelations about the involvement of Stephen Harper’s special counsel and legal adviser Benjamin Perrin may offer a few more indications as to who was actually pulling the strings.
To start with, here’s CTV’s reporting on the drafting of the agreement between Mike Duffy and Nigel Wright: Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former special counsel and legal adviser worked on the legal deal between Nigel Wright and Sen. Mike Duffy’s lawyer that called for Wright to help Duffy pay off $90,000 in (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 21, 2013, at 9:29 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- Murray Dobbin contrasts the B.C. NDP’s recent election loss against the type of popular focus which helped Saskatchewan’s CCF to earn a twenty-year stay in office in the face of far more hysterical opposition: You can design a campaign that projects a positive vision of the future but two things about the NDP’s approach doomed it to failure. First, you can’t run a positive campaign in a month. It takes time to engage people in a vision of the future, even one they agree with. Secondly, the NDP tied one (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 20, 2013, at 11:41 am Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.
- Yes, there’s plenty more on the Cons’ Senate scandal, with Tim Harper headlining the latest discussion: Mike Duffy is radioactive.
The one-time Conservative cheerleader is now the poster boy for the filth which envelops the party brand.
The man holed up on Friendly Lane in Cavendish, P.E.I., has brought down one of the most powerful men in Canada, shaken the Stephen Harper government to its core and blown a hole in the confidence the increasingly skeptical Conservative base has in the party.…Wright says he acted on his own, but (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 19, 2013, at 1:26 pm Plenty of others have had loads to say about the scandal surrounding Stephen Harper, Nigel Wright, Mike Duffy and the Senate generally – with Wright’s resignation today serving as just the latest chapter of a story with plenty left to be told. But I’ll add a couple of notes to the mix.
First, I’m not sure some commentators (especially those thinking that “the cheque” is the real story) have noticed the significance of this juxtaposition of events: A senior government official told Postmedia News on Thursday that Wright wrote a cheque to Duffy’s lawyer “in trust.” The official, who (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 19, 2013, at 12:01 pm This and that for your Sunday reading.
- Justin Ling writes that the Cons’ aversion to accountability isn’t limited to their own government, as they’re one of the few holdouts against transparency in resource-sector reporting of payments to governments abroad.
- Meanwhile, Stuart Trew discusses an international citizens’ initiative to keep the Trans-Pacific Partnership from imposing harmful copyright rules: A coalition website, launched this week as a 17th round of TPP negotiations gets underway in Lima, Peru, calls on TPP negotiators to “reject copyright proposals that restrict open Internet, access to knowledge, economic opportunity and fundamental rights.” The website (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 16, 2013, at 10:58 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Duncan Cameron is the latest to weigh in on the Cons’ distorted sense of priorities in directing public research money toward private profits: Publicly available research is important. Since no one knows where discoveries or advances in knowledge will lead, the entire scientific community needs access to new research. There is no other way to maximize potential societal benefits. Learning is cumulative, innovative thinking flows from research building on public research.
Now with the privatization of research findings, discoveries and knowledge become industrial secrets, unavailable to Canadians who have paid for it, (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 15, 2013, at 10:10 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Michael Babad takes a look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data on wages and employment levels – reaching the conclusion that the corporatist effort to drive wages down does nothing to improve employment prospects. But the absence of any remotely plausible policy justification hasn’t stopped the Sask Party from “modernizing” the province’s rules governing work by setting them back upwards of half a century.
- Meanwhile, Pat Atkinson rightly notes that the most important problem with the Cons’ push for temporary foreign workers is the “temporary” part. And Nicholas Keung and Dana Flavelle (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 14, 2013, at 9:48 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- Karl Nerenberg reports on the House Finance Committee’s hearings into income inequality in Canada, featuring a few familiar themes which we should hear far more often from our policy-makers: “I would make all tax credits refundable, including the current non-refundable ones,” Boadway recommended, and then went further, “I would condition many of them to income, the way we condition the GST credit. I would enhance disability tax credits and make them available to all provincial disability recipients.”
On tax breaks for upper income Canadians and corporations, Boadway prescribed tough medicine: “I (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 13, 2013, at 10:02 am Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.
- Michael Harris tears into the Cons for their latest set of Senate abuses: It is time once more to throw up on your shoes over the Senate. We all did that when Liberal Senator Andrew Thompson went missing in action for a decade at public expense — our man in Mexico. This stable of political studs put out to pasture at public expense for party loyalties costs Canada $92.5 million annually in salaries, senator allowances and administrative costs…
Each lottery winner in the Senate receives a base annual salary of $135,200. The (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 12, 2013, at 11:52 am Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading.
- Daniel Boffey catches one of David Cameron’s top aides saying what most Cons leave as an unstated assumption: that recession and depressed wages are good for business (as long as “business” is defined only to mean short-term profits based on exploitation): The prime minister’s adviser on enterprise has told the cabinet that the economic downturn is an excellent time for new businesses to boost profits and grow because labour is cheap, the Observer can reveal.
Lord Young, a cabinet minister under the late Baroness Thatcher, who is the only aide with his (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 10, 2013, at 10:47 am Predictably, the Cons are running through their Rolodex of excuses as to why they’re spending public money on partisan media monitoring – with the answer being that they want to make sure that PR stunts achieve additional partisan goals: The prime minister’s spokesman Andrew MacDougall told HuffPost PCO tracks the coverage of their backbench MPs because they make announcements on behalf of the government all the time. “Of course the government wants to know what kind of coverage gets generated from those announcements,” he said.
But the Cons’ abuse of announcement opportunities is far from a new issue. So I’ll (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 9, 2013, at 10:49 am Leaving aside whether Stephen Harper’s previously-undisclosed media monitoring is actually right in substance, Brian Jean isn’t entirely wrong as to why he and other Con MPs are facing it: Conservative MP Brian Jean, who is on the list, said he’s not sure why he was flagged, but also said he isn’t troubled by it.
“They must be interested in what their colleagues are doing, right? I mean the government must be. It seems to make sense from a party position that you would be interested in what your members are saying,” he said.
The only problem is that so (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 9, 2013, at 9:31 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- George Monbiot writes about the absurdity of the right-wing choice to promote inequality in the name of competition among the wealthy when the ultimate results are worse for everybody: The capture by the executive class of so much wealth performs no useful function. What the very rich appear to value is relative income. If executives were all paid 5% of current levels, the competition between them (a questionable virtue anyway) would be no less fierce. As the immensely rich HL Hunt commented several decades ago: “Money is just a way of keeping score.”
(Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 8, 2013, at 1:02 pm Yes, there’s plenty of reason to wonder what the Canadian public is getting for millions of dollars in ads intended to advertise…nothing at all. But I’ll point out that the answer may be even worse than one might suspect at first glance.
Here’s the background to the latest set of ad spending: Taxpayer-funded government ads are supposed to inform citizens about programs and services, according to Treasury Board guidelines.
But when the Conservatives recently put out a tender for a major new ad agency contract that could see the feel-good “economic action plan” brand continued until 2016, they highlighted (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 8, 2013, at 1:02 pm Yes, there’s plenty of reason to wonder what the Canadian public is getting for millions of dollars in ads intended to advertise…nothing at all. But I’ll point out that the answer may be even worse than one might suspect at first glance.
Here’s the background to the latest set of ad spending: Taxpayer-funded government ads are supposed to inform citizens about programs and services, according to Treasury Board guidelines.
But when the Conservatives recently put out a tender for a major new ad agency contract that could see the feel-good “economic action plan” brand continued until 2016, they highlighted (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 8, 2013, at 9:41 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Linda McQuaig discusses Stephen Harper’s class war: Canadians don’t like Harper’s anti-worker agenda — when they notice it. That’s why there’s been such a public outcry since the temporary foreign worker program was exposed as a mechanism by which the Harper government has flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of cheap foreign workers, thereby suppressing Canadian wages in the interests of helping corporations.
Apart from this clumsy fiasco, the Harperites have been adroit at keeping their anti-worker bias under the radar. Instead, they’ve directed their attacks against unions, portraying them as undemocratic (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 7, 2013, at 9:41 am This and that for your Tuesday reading…
- Joseph Stiglitz discusses the abuse of intellectual property law to turn publicly-funded research into privately-held profit centres (no matter how many people die as a result): (A) Utah-based company, Myriad Genetics, claims more than that. It claims to own the rights to any test for the presence of the two critical genes associated with breast cancer – and has ruthlessly enforced that right, though their test is inferior to one that Yale University was willing to provide at much lower cost. The consequences have been tragic: Thorough, affordable testing that identifies high-risk (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 6, 2013, at 9:51 am 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…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 2, 2013, at 9:45 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Ed Broadbent takes a look at how our tax system can combat inequality in more ways than one: The Broadbent Institute is presenting proposals Tuesday to the Finance Committee of the House of Commons. Our primary recommendation is that Canada establish as a goal the provision of a basic income-tested guarantee to all citizens through a fairer personal income tax system.
The tax/transfer system equalizes income in two important ways. First, progressive income taxes mean that the affluent pay a higher percentage of income than middle and low income earners. Second, these (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 1, 2013, at 10:29 am Nobody could have foreseen that the much-ballyhooed Backbench Spring would give way to the Toadying Summer Olympics. But sure enough, the first question from a Con MP nominally challenging his party’s whip looks like a gold medalist in the Party Boot-Licking and Tar Sands Shilling biathlon.
As best, it looks like we may be able to draw some amusement seeing the Cons’ backbenchers compete for the right to ask future variations on “Mr. Prime Minister, your government has the momentum of a runaway freight train loaded with Uncle Cappy’s Magic Non-Polluting Petroleum-Derivative Elixir, which will never spill and we shouldn’t (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 1, 2013, at 9:43 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Thomas Walkom writes that yesterday’s minor tinkering aside, the goal of the Cons’ temporary foreign worker program is still to drive down Canadian wages. And Miles Corak argues that the resulting distortion of employment markets shouldn’t be any more acceptable to a libertarian than a progressive: Flooding the market with workers from elsewhere, year in and year out – even during a major recession – is not about an acute labour shortage. It is nothing more than a wage subsidy to low-paying firms, a subsidy that stunts the reallocation of goods, capital, and (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 30, 2013, at 10:47 am There’s been no lack of past commentary (from myself and others) on how income splitting is about as regressive a policy as one could possibly design – and I won’t repeat it for the moment other than to say that the supposed “compromise” offered by Jack Mintz only goes a step further in ascribing zero value to a stay-at-home spouse.
But it is worth pointing out Lib MP John McKay’s participation in yesterday’s PR stunt – explained by the bizarre claim that the issue is one that we should “de-politicize” income distribution and tax policy.
Simply put, the issue (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 28, 2013, at 11:18 am Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading.
- Daniel Kaufman notes that the EU is on the verge of implementing new standards for transparency in oil extraction – while recognizing that big oil has fought the effort every step of the way in an effort to keep its activities secret. And Shaun Thomas discusses the no-knowledge zone set up around the Northern Gateway pipeline, as Nathan Cullen’s questions within the review process revealed that the federal government hadn’t so much as talked to First Nations or affected industries about the possible impact of an oil spill.
- But then, the Cons (Read more…)
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