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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 April 24, 2013, at 9:35 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- George Monbiot discusses the fallout from decades of corporate-controlled governments abdicating their responsibility to consider the public interest: In other ages, states sought to seize as much power as they could. Today, the self-hating state renounces its powers. Governments anathematise governance. They declare their role redundant and illegitimate. They launch furious assaults on their own branches, seeking wherever possible to lop them off.
This self-mutilation is a response to the fact that power has shifted. States now operate at the behest of others. Deregulation, privatisation, the shrinking of the scope, scale and spending (Read more…) the state: these are now seen as the only legitimate policies. The corporations and billionaires to whom governments defer will have it no other way.
Just as taxation tends to redistribute wealth, regulation tends to redistribute power. A democratic state controls and contains powerful interests on behalf of . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on April 18, 2013, at 9:49 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Ellie Mae O’Hagan and Nicholas Shaxson annihilate the claim that perpetually lowering corporate and upper-income tax rates offers any competitive advantage: Tax “competition”, it turns out, is always harmful. First, while people rarely move in response to tax changes – flighty financial capital does move. Governments “compete” for it by cutting tax rates on mobile capital (which means, in effect, cutting taxes on the rich.) And if you’re not taxing the rich, you’ve got to make that up elsewhere. How do you do that? You tax people who can’t afford to
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By Greg Fingas, on April 4, 2013, at 11:17 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- John Greenwood and CBC News both report on the offshore tax avoidance being revealed through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. And Susan Lunn observes that Canada’s federal parties are all at least paying lip service to the issue – though of course the Cons’ cuts to tax enforcement speak louder than their spin.
- Meanwhile, Paul McLeod notes that income inequality will also receive at least some much-needed attention in Parliament. And Danyaal Raza’s discussion of the damage done to public health by inequality looks to offer one important point worth
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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
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By Greg Fingas, on January 24, 2013, at 9:00 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- There’s plenty of reason for concern about the departure of some of the few independent officers who have successfully held the Cons to account at times – with departing environment commissioner Scott Vaughan serving as only the latest example.
- But the more important story is less the presence of watchdogs than that of effective regulators – and the fact that the Cons have limited environmental enforcement to sporadic letter-writing campaigns gives us plenty of reason for concern no matter who’s in a position to point it out.
- Meanwhile, Luigi Zanasi
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By Greg Fingas, on January 9, 2013, at 10:06 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Daniel Wilson discusses how Stephen Harper’s antipathy toward First Nations is making a failure of his time in office: On the global stage, he stood almost alone in opposition to 144 other countries in voting against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Domestically, he has tabled bills that diminish First Nations jurisdiction to that of administrative agencies of the federal government. His party has consistently claimed that First Nation governments are corrupt or mismanaged. He killed the Kelowna Accord. His steadfast refusal to fund First Nation child
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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
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By Greg Fingas, on December 13, 2012, at 8:48 am Here, on the need for the labour movement to reach beyond currently-unionized workplaces to address the needs of unrepresented workers – and the positive signs on that front.
For further reading…- Thomas Walkom recognizes the same common interests between workers in different types of workplaces, but worries that the labour movement hasn’t yet done enough to bridge the gap.- Meanwhile, We Move to Canada documents a few of the more promising signs in recent months; Laura Clawson discusses the Black Friday protests; Josh Eidelson reports on the New York City fast-food strike; and David Dayen notes that
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By Greg Fingas, on December 6, 2012, at 6:19 pm This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Pat Atkinson discusses the need to make sure that Saskatchewan’s boom-time spending actually sets us up for long-term prosperity, rather than fiscal disaster: Even though the OECD report, the burgeoning federal government deficit, China’s economic slowdown and America’s political deadlock all advise us that now is the time for caution, the Wall government is trapped. Its political image is completely dependent upon constant economic growth or the appearance of it.
It is so cemented in its own message of a New Saskatchewan, that any deviation from it is unlikely.
From its first
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By Greg Fingas, on November 29, 2012, at 8:12 am This and that for your Thursday reading.- There’s always been reason for skepticism about the pundit-class theory that the 2011 federal election should simply be deleted from the history books as an aberration. But Abacus provides a compelling example … . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
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,
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By Greg Fingas, on September 12, 2012, at 9:11 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Pat Atkinson discusses the importance of unions in ensuring a fair deal for all workers: It’s because of unions and their tenacious advocacy on behalf of their members that workers not only in this province but also in other jurisdictions enjoy legislated workplace benefits gained through negotiation: the 40-hour work week, the eight-hour work day, equal pay for equal work for women, occupational health and safety, paid vacations, overtime pay and more.
These laws did not come easily. We now take many of these workplace rights for granted, but should we?… If the
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By Greg Fingas, on September 5, 2012, at 1:06 pm Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- There wasn’t much doubt from the recent storm of astroturfed Twitter messages that NDP candidate Catherine Fife stood to do well in tomorrow’s Kitchener-Waterloo provincial byelection. But I’m not sure anybody anticipated she’d have a sixteen-point lead over all comers – and the stunning result should offer reason to doubt that vilifying workers (as the McGuinty Libs have done with teachers) is a remotely popular position when there’s a credible alternative on the ballot.
- It takes some effort for anti-environment minister Peter Kent to do worse than his party has done in
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By Greg Fingas, on September 1, 2012, at 10:11 am This and that to start your long weekend.
- Antonia Zerbisias and Thomas Walkom both discuss the connection between organized labour and the very existence of a substantial middle class. And Janice Kennedy worries about the all-too-prevalent trend toward worker-bashing.
- But Andrew Jackson nicely points out why attempts to undermine unions have nothing at all to do with general economic development, and everything to do with distancing a small elite from the rest of the population: Further to my earlier post on the “own goal” scored by the Fraser Institute report on North American labour markets, the Table below
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By Greg Fingas, on August 1, 2012, at 12:47 pm Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- The presidents of Canada’s provincial Federations of Labour highlight how the provinces need to respond to the Harper Cons’ efforts to push down wages and trample on workers’ rightst: Canadians need our country’s premiers to denounce this low-wage agenda and stand up for what is in the best interest of working people.
When the premiers meet this fall to discuss the economy, we believe the labour market ought to be front and centre in that discussion. They must denounce the exploitive expansion of the (temporary foreign worker program). They must collectively demand that
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By Greg Fingas, on July 6, 2012, at 9:33 am Miscellaneous material to end your week.
- Dan Gardner nicely sums up how any Con cabinet shuffles are utterly irrelevant since Stephen Harper prefers ciphers to functional ministers in any event: In the past, parties in power always had factions, and ministers with their own political clout, and these provided at least a modest check on the power of the prime minister. “In the old Progressive Conservative (party), you had Flora MacDonald who ran for the leadership and had her own base of support. You had Joe Clark, who was a former prime minister,” Hicks says. When Mulroney said he
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By Greg Fingas, on June 13, 2012, at 9:48 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Michael Harris lists ten things the Harper Cons want Canadians to forget before the 2015 election. But it’s worth keeping in mind that their expectations for mind-wiping are surely shaped by their own willingness to completely forget what they were repeating incessantly before a change in talking points: just look how quickly they switched from pointing to a supposed plan to respond to the Auditor General’s criticism of the F-35 procurement process to claiming nobody could possibly have taken seriously the promise they’d make numbers public.
- But as Nathan Cullen noted in
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By Greg Fingas, on June 7, 2012, at 9:14 am Here, expanding on this post as to the importance of a functioning federal system as a means of counterbalancing regional declines – and the forces working to limit anything of the sort in Canada.
For further reading…- Frances Russell also laments the Harper firewall model based on the need for national-level planning and coordination. – Pat Atkinson notes that Alison Redford’s goal of a national energy strategy serves as an ideal case in point. – Finally, the Florida vs. Spain comparison is drawn from here. And for some bonus Krugman…
By Greg Fingas, on May 30, 2012, at 9:36 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Thomas Walkom criticizes the Cons’ war on labour at the federal level – though John Ivison notes that the Cons’ habit of interfering in every federal labour dispute looks to help the NDP all the more. And Pat Atkinson worries that the Sask Party is headed down a similarly destructive road in Saskatchewan.
- John Ibbitson recognizes why Thomas Mulcair’s message on the environment and the economy has been well received by the Canadian public: Mr. Mulcair accuses the Conservative government of failing to require oil and other natural resource companies to pay
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By Greg Fingas, on May 23, 2012, at 12:14 pm Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Brian Topp weighs in on Canada’s history of raw resource exploitation that should offer a lesson for anybody interested in learning. And pogge points out why Thomas Mulcair is right to dig his heels in, while Frances Russell observes that Mulcair is just plain right.
- Meanwhile, this may be the most appalling example yet of the Cons combining a short-sighted obsession with the export of raw resources with an utter unwillingness to do anything about climate change: Although greenhouse gas emissions from the oilsands have more than tripled since 1990, according to
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By Greg Fingas, on May 16, 2012, at 11:34 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Andrew Jackson raises an absolutely devastating point to refute anybody trying to use “it’s all about growth!!!” as an excuse for slashing social supports and handing free money to the rich: In this age of austerity, we are constantly told by governments that we have to tighten our belts. Tuition fees have to go up; public pensions, Unemployment Insurance and social assistance benefits have to be cut; universal public health care is no longer affordable, and so on ad nauseam.
But, as my friend Peter Puxley recently reminded me, it is passing
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By Greg Fingas, on May 10, 2012, at 9:29 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Jim Stanford sets the record straight as to how Canada’s manufacturing sector has eroded over the past couple of decades: (T)echnology can explain some of the job loss, but not most of it. It certainly cannot explain the disproportionate carnage in Canadian manufacturing, nor the all-out industrial warfare which now characterizes much of the sector (like the management lockouts at Caterpillar and Rio Tinto). The loss of 500,000 manufacturing jobs in Canada over the last decade was far more dramatic than most jurisdictions. Many factors contributed to this miserable record, including lopsided
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By Greg Fingas, on April 26, 2012, at 9:47 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Paul Wells had previously theorized that the size of environmental demonstrations in Montreal might hint at the NDP’s ability to establish a long-term base. So what ended up happening? What happened in Montreal was a great big rally for Earth Day whose messaging was, in part, overtly anti-oil-sands. And it seems to have been a hit. Apparently something like a quarter of a million people marched in lousy weather.
Meanwhile, one of the Cons’ leading cheerleaders in Quebec is quite explicitly trying to push “drill baby drill”. Which only figures to help
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