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By Greg Fingas, on May 16, 2013, at 9:26 am Here, on how a narrow focus on pursuing a seemingly safe path to a bare majority government may have contributed to the B.C. NDP’s stunning election defeat this week.
Needless to say, there’s no lack of other commentary on the election, with Alice Funke, Sixth Estate, Michael Stewart, Paul Ramsey and Thomas Walkom all reaching conclusions relatively similar to my own. And while not a lot of observers can claim to have identified the problem in B.C., Dan Tan and Leftdog look to have earned at least partial credit.
[Update: Let's add David (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 3, 2013, at 9:59 am Assorted content to end your week.
- Arthur Haberman argues that our universal public health care system helps contribute to a more democratic society: There is something that political philosophers — those like Tocqueville and Mill in the 19th century — have come to call living democratically. By this it is meant that voting is but a small part of what being in a democracy is about. It also includes volunteering in small ways to make our communities better, participating in decisions about what happens to your town or your neighbourhood, judging your fellow citizens by the quality of their (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 18, 2013, at 9:02 am Here, building off of my previous analysis on the current positioning of Canada’s federal parties.
For further reading, see:- Bob Hepburn and Carol Goar on the purpose and effect of attack ads in general; and- Andrew Coyne on the Cons’ particular brand of personal attack, featuring some suggestions to reduce the amount of negative advertising.
By Greg Fingas, on March 13, 2013, at 12:29 pm 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
By Greg Fingas, on March 12, 2013, at 9:12 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has unveiled its alternative federal budget – which highlights the choice between the Cons’ needless austerity, and the 200,000-300,000 extra jobs which could be created alongside important social improvements which could be brought about through well-placed public action.
- Meanwhile, Murray Dobbin worries that the use of interest rates alone as an economic growth strategy is feeding an unsustainable housing bubble – offering anpther indication as to why we should work on expanding socially productive activities rather than hoping that unfettered (and indeed exacerbated) market forces
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on March 3, 2013, at 2:42 pm Assorted content for your Sunday reading.
- Chrystia Freeland comments on the disproportionate influence of the super-rich in a democratic system which is supposed to value citizens equally: “I think most Americans believe in the idea of political equality,” Callahan told me. “That idea is obviously corrupted when in 2012, one guy, Sheldon Adelson, can make more political donations than the residents of 12 states put together.”
The Demos study draws in part on the quantitative research of Martin Gilens, a professor of politics at Princeton University and author of “Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
By Greg Fingas, on March 2, 2013, at 11:13 am This and that for your weekend reading.
- Plenty more commentators are taking a turn duly mocking the Cons’ Senate shenanigans. Here’s Tabatha Southey: In fact, Mr. Duffy lives and votes in Kanata, a suburb of Ottawa, in a home he purchased five years before he was appointed to the Senate in 2008. He has a modest, seasonal cottage in Cavendish, PEI, which is reportedly seldom used.
There are signs there may be a number of these houses across the country – dark, lifeless, spooky places children rush by after sundown because some people say those houses have senators.
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 28, 2013, at 8:52 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Molly Ball writes about the false assumptions underlying far too much political discussion – with one looming as particularly significant for Canadian purposes: 5. Campaign ads really, really, really don’t make much difference.
In this part of the paper, Fiorina’s exasperation becomes palpable. Political scientists have studied the effect of campaign media for decades and consistently found it to be very small. But that doesn’t stop commentators from talking endlessly about the potential effects of ads. “I shall say no more about this, because given the long history of the disjunction, it
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 25, 2013, at 8:28 am Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.
- Andrew Nikiforuk discusses how Alberta and other petro-states have ended up destroying their treasuries and their democratic systems alike by relying excessively on volatile resource prices: Thanks to the volatile nature of the world’s most lucrative commodity, various petro states find themselves short of cash. And that’s because most petro states don’t know how to budget let alone govern.
Like any plantation economy, petro states operate pretty much like irrational monocultures: they know how pump oil, sell oil, talk oil and spend oil. But they don’t know how to save or diversify its
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 17, 2013, at 11:14 am This and that for your Sunday reading.
- Joseph Stiglitz discusses how the combination of increasingly concentrated wealth and deteriorating has eliminated any pretense of equal opportunity within the U.S.: It’s not that social mobility is impossible, but that the upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity. According to research from the Brookings Institution, only 58 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of income earners move out of that category, and just 6 percent born into the bottom fifth move into the top. Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 11, 2013, at 10:14 am Miscellaneous material to start your week.
- Shawn McCarthy discusses the Cons’ latest plan to sell Keystone XL to the U.S. – which involves hoping that the best-resourced government on the planet will be suckered into accepting a transparently false pretense that the Cons have the slightest interest in addressing climate change. And Harper cabinet appointee Monte Solberg offers a window into the Cons’ environmental mindset, trying to make a case against “thinking globally” on the basis that there are easier votes to be won by focusing on small vacation areas while shredding the rest of the planet.
-
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 9, 2013, at 10:13 am Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- Tabatha Southey rightly turns Brad Trost into a poster boy for the Harper Cons’ deliberate aversion to critical self-evaluation: We shouldn’t be too quick to judge.
Let’s instead take a cue from Conservative MP Brad Trost, who, when questioned regarding the calls, said, “I don’t think there was anything wrong with the robo-call. I think it was good and accurate information and we should stand behind it.”
Then Canada’s Candide went on to add, “I didn’t hear it. I don’t know the script. Don’t know anything. … One of my colleagues had
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 5, 2013, at 9:07 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- The CP reports on the Canadian applicants rejected by HD Mining as it chose instead to staff its Murray River coal project solely with low-rights temporary immigrant workers: The unions, which are more broadly seeking a judicial review of Ottawa’s decision to issue permits to the workers in the first place, say their findings justify the legal challenge.
They filed documents to the Federal Court late Friday outlining some of the qualifications found within the tossed resumes.
One applicant had more than 30 years of wide-ranging and extensive experience in all aspects
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 1, 2013, at 10:09 am John Warnock’s response to last week’s column (which focused on how anybody with an interest in Saskatchewan’s future direction should be interested in acting on that interest through party involvement) is worth a read in its suggestions as to the policies the NDP should stand for. But Warnock looks to go thoroughly off the rails on at least two points.
First, there’s his assertion about the content of the leadership debates so far: The next election, like the last, will focus on the state of the economy, ownership and control of the resource industries, and general taxation policy. Brad Wall
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On disillusionment
By Greg Fingas, on January 26, 2013, at 10:52 am Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- Susan Delacourt comments on the role of robocalls in turning citizens away from politics – though it’s worth pointing out that the Cons may well see that as a desirable result to capitalize on a modest base of support: What may need more testing, however, is how robocalls work as a tool to suppress votes. Sure, they don’t make people any more likely to turn out at the polls, or vote for a particular party.
But they may just be annoying enough to turn people off politics or voting — and, from all
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 24, 2013, at 9:54 am Here, on how a close Saskatchewan NDP leadership campaign makes it all the more likely that a small number of new members can make a massive difference in the race.
The most important followup link is naturally to the party’s membership page – which should be the best way to connect before tomorrow afternoon. But for those interested, leftdog and Aaron Genest have both issued membership appeals beyond those of the campaigns.
By Greg Fingas, on January 23, 2013, at 8:30 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Erika Shaker rightly tears into the special brand of FAIPOF demanding that First Nations protesters focus solely on their own community leaders rather than recognizing broader and more systematic inequality: Much is being made of Chief Spence’s Escalade (although I’m unsure if she actually owns one or if it’s urban legend) to try and mock the principled stand she has taken to call attention to the shameful conditions in which so many Indigenous peoples live. Because apparently if she had figured out how to stretch those shamefully inadequate federal transfers instead of engaging
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 19, 2013, at 3:56 pm Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- Raz Godelnik challenges the all-too-conventional wisdom that corporations (and indeed individuals) should see tax avoidance and evasion as virtues: One of the most common arguments is that the tax-avoidance techniques used by corporations like Starbucks or Google are legal and therefore they’re not to be blamed, but the tax systems that make them possible.
Apparently these techniques are indeed legal, but here are couple of other things that are legal, such as: cutting down trees in rainforests, sourcing blood minerals from Congo, working with suppliers in China that release hazardous materials into rivers
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 11, 2013, at 9:37 am Not surprisingly, I have some reservations about Kai Nagata’s view that the federal Lib leadership campaign has much to offer toward the development of progressive politics in Canada. But I’ll give Nagata credit for this much: he’s absolutely right to make the point that we should treat active and public involvement within party structures as a positive step, not a disqualifying factor for anybody wanting to be able to speak to broader issues.
Which makes this look like one of the more interesting developments in Saskatchewan’s NDP leadership campaign so far. While all of the candidates are seeking to encourage
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On party time
By Greg Fingas, on January 5, 2013, at 4:45 pm There are surely worse offenders to point out in the bevy of recaps and previews we inevitably see at year’s end. But I’ll pick on Paul Wells’ latest as an example of a well-regarded observer making obvious missteps in trying to limit the scope of possibilities we should consider: The opposition parties should all worry, all the time, that their support is simply a system of communicating vases: that rising Green support hurts mostly New Democrat and Liberal incumbents, that Trudeau or Marc Garneau or Martha Hall Findlay can hope at best only to replace Mulcair as Stephen Harper’s sixth
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On ranges of options
By Greg Fingas, on January 4, 2013, at 10:26 am Jon Worth’s post on the distinction between partisan politics (as generally understood) and movement-based activism is well worth a read, particularly in pointing out how the latter may better express what people actually want to see out of politics: Since first reading Mary Kaldor’s piece at the LSE EUROPP blog this autumn about alternative social movements I’ve been fascinated by the practical meaning of the term “prefigurative action” that she mentions. Her description of the term is “the attempt to practice the kind of democracy that the participants imagine” – i.e. to behave in politics in the
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On open invitations
By Greg Fingas, on January 1, 2013, at 12:02 pm This and that to start the new year.
- Lynn Stuart Parramore discusses the dangers of needless means-testing for basic social benefits: When I spoke to Joseph Stiglitz, he discussed the idea that “means-testing is mean.” Programs like Medicare and Social Security, he explained, are matters of political economy. They are important to social cohesion, where support comes from the fact that everybody is participating. “We don’t means-test public education,” explained Stiglitz, “because we believe that we want people to have the same opportunities and we lose out on that with means-testing.” The same is true of our
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on December 29, 2012, at 5:40 pm Sixth Estate and impolitical have both followed up on the Cons’ attempts to attack Canada’s opposition parties for having the nerve to ask questions of their government by noting that in contrast to the Cons’ spin, the UK offers answers to MPs’ questions at a hundredth of the cost. But I’ll note that there’s plenty more worth comparing between the two systems of questions and answers.
Let’s compare the answers to written questions provided by the respective governments of Canada and the UK for October 31, 2012.
The Harper Cons answered two questions in the following terms: Question No. 827–
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Question and answer
By Greg Fingas, on December 28, 2012, at 9:19 am Here, on how Canadians have a far more positive view of protest movements than of the politicians whose actions bring about the need for activism – and how joining movements like Idle No More can ensure we have less to complain about.
For further reading.- Environics’ polling on public support for British Columbia’s HST movement, Occupy and the Quebec student strike is discussed here. – In contrast, see Angus Reid’s finding that only 27% of respondents respect politicians – and Ipsos Reid’s conclusion that only 9% trust them.- Which makes for just the time to point
By Greg Fingas, on December 26, 2012, at 2:28 pm This and that for your Wednesday reading.
- Pat Atkinson highlights what should probably be the story of the year for 2012: the continued degradation of Canadian democracy under a government which views Parliament and the public with an alarming degree of contempt: Harper’s Conservatives see Parliament as a nuisance. Committees meet in secret, and opposition MPs aren’t to reveal what is learned. And it is clear that most of Parliament’s power has been centralized into a prime minister’s office that is determined to control governing party MPs and even its cabinet ministers.
Paul Thomas, professor emeritus of politics at
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
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