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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 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 Erin Weir, on May 16, 2013, at 10:51 am My op-ed in today’s Saskatoon StarPhoenix (page A11):
Privatizing ISC is a poor deal for Saskatchewan
The provincial government estimates that selling 60 per cent of the Information Services Corporation will raise up to $120 million for infrastructure investment. Is that a good deal for the people of Saskatchewan?
Last year, ISC generated $20 million of profit for the provincial treasury. Losing 60 per cent of this profit, $12 million, every year is a very costly way to get $120 million of one-time cash. That deal would be equivalent to borrowing in perpetuity at an interest rate of (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 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 opseudiablogue, on May 8, 2013, at 11:54 am Craig Woudsma is the reluctant hero of the so-called “chemo drug scandal.” He is the OPSEU pharmacy assistant at the Peterborough Regional Health Centre who stopped to question the differences between oncology medication prepared by the hospital’s old contract supplier and … Continue reading →
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 4, 2013, at 1:29 pm I’ve made the case questioning gratuitous privatization of SLGA’s liquor sales (as well as a controlling stake in ISC) based on the actual profit levels associated with real Crowns. So what kind of contrary argument is there for pushing privatization rather than public investment? Let’s ask the Leader-Post’s editorial board: (M)ore private liquor stores means less profits for SLGA to give to government. It’s (sic) familiar argument, but not universally accepted: critics say this ignores the income taxes private firms and their employees pay, and the taxes generated by the construction of new stores.
Now, the apparent critics (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 25, 2013, at 9:31 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Andrew Simms and Stephen Reid note that the corporatist dogma that everything is done more efficiently in the private sector has no apparent basis in reality: The myth of private sector superiority says that the private sector is efficient and dynamic, the public sector wasteful and slow; that the more we can get the private sector to run things the better. That the head of a massive public enterprise like the Olympics can so blithely discount what underpins it demonstrates its reach. In fact, while billboard adverts said we had commercial sponsors (Read more…)
By Doug Allan, on April 22, 2013, at 9:01 am
A commission of inquiry has heard that SNC-Lavalin deliberately went around Quebec’s political party financing rules, leading to a flurry of donations to the governing Quebec Liberal Party in 2009. The donations came as the engineering firm was bidding on a major hospital construction project, the media reports.
What is not reported, however, is that this is a privatized P3 project.
One of the biggest in fact. These privatized P3 projects are designed so private sector corporations get their mitts on a much larger share of the booty than they would under normal procurement (e.g. billions of dollars in (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 19, 2013, at 10:47 am 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
By Greg Fingas, on April 16, 2013, at 9:58 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- George Monbiot comments on the outsized influence of advertisers on children: How many people believe this makes the world a better place? A company called TenNine has hung hoardings in the corridors and common rooms of 750 British schools. Among its clients are Nike, Adidas, Orange, Tesco and Unilever. It boasts that its “high impact platform delivers right to the heart of the 11-18 year old market“.
Other firms are closing in. Boomerang Media, which represents Sega, Atari, Virgin, Umbro and others, has persuaded schools to distribute Revlon perfume samples
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Doug Allan, on April 15, 2013, at 8:51 pm The majority of the costs reported by the Auditor General for the cancellation of the Mississauga gas plant were payments to the U.S. based investment firm that provided financing for the project — $149.6 million.
The private company doing the project (Greenfield) negotiated expensive financing for the project with this U.S. investment firm — 14% annual interest. Compared to the cost of public financing, that is through the roof, perhaps 7 or 8 times higher.
The Auditor General confirms this interest rate, but adds that “Penalties for Greenfield’s defaulting on the agreement were heavy: Greenfield would have to . . . → Read More: Defending Public Healthcare: Ontario P3 fiasco: $90 million cost to finance $59 million loan
By Doug Allan, on April 11, 2013, at 3:46 pm Martin Regg Cohn, Queen’s Park columnist for the Toronto Star, expressed his outrage at some length today over the College of Pharmacists not answering media questions quickly enough about the diluted chemotherapy drug scandal.
But he says nothing of the response from the private corporation that actually mixed the chemotherapy drugs That company has — according to the Star’s sister paper, the Spectator — repeatedly refused interview requests and refers questions to the Ministry of Health and LTC. Early on, it reportedly threatened legal action if its name was mentioned and suggested the problem lay elsewhere. As one CEO
. . . → Read More: Defending Public Healthcare: Chemo fiasco – – the real perils of secrecy
By Lorne, on March 22, 2013, at 7:54 pm
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. – George Orwell
As always, the writer had exceptional clarity about where Western society was headed.
H/t Steve Collett Recommend this Post
By Stephen Elliott-Buckley, on March 11, 2013, at 4:00 pm
Donald Smith was protesting a sign at Glenmore Landing in Calgary’s southwest Sunday that bans political demonstrations. [CBC]
The privately owned parking lot near the prime minister’s constituency office asserts that protesting is prohibited. On the surface, this looks like the prime minister is impeding the constitutional rights of expression and peaceful assembly.
I’m sure he finds this all quite convenient, but a large hidden issue in this is the privatization of public space.
Can I prohibit protest in a space I own? Possibly.
Can I lament at the amount of space deemed to be public [parking lot, shopping mall] (Read more…)
By thescottross.blogspot.com, on March 4, 2013, at 3:57 am It would be a risky claim to suggest health care should be privatized while education, from preschool to post-secondary, should be fully publicly provided, but considering the importance of education, what’s really risky is that currently we have it the other way around.
To compare the importance of health care and education, ask yourself, would a nation that only had public health care be better off than one that only had public education?
Comparing such black and white societies may seem extreme, but it helps to clarify what is the more important public policy, health care or education. By the
. . . → Read More: The Scott Ross: Why Health Care Should Be Privatized
By Doug Allan, on February 25, 2013, at 4:03 pm Contracting out of medical transcription work is becoming more common in Ontario hospitals.
So it is noteworthy that our sister union in BC, the Hospital Employees Union, reports today that “the cost of outsourcing medical transcription services in the Lower Mainland has increased by an average of 26 per cent a year over the last five years, according to financial documents produced by health authorities.”
Regardless, the health authorities “plan to completely contract out in-house medical transcription later this year and fire about 130 medical transcriptionists (MTs), who currently work directly for health authorities.”
Currently, about 50 per
. . . → Read More: Defending Public Healthcare: Contracting out costs soar 26% per year
By David Climenhaga, on February 25, 2013, at 1:45 am Fresh air and yogurt might have helped these guys live to be 160, but if they’d lived in Alberta, instead of Russia, where could they afford to sleep? Below, seniors care in Calgary, back in the day, before oldsters all carried tennis racquets, rode bicycles and looked like fashion models, only with white hair.
Do you remember that promise by the Alberta government to build 3,000 seniors’ beds? It turns out they only planned to rent them!
The problem with renting beds from private companies, of course, is the same as with any form of privatized medicare: it ends up
. . . → Read More: Alberta Diary: Renting seniors’ beds is a formula for failure – and it’s time for Alberta to stop doing it
By Doug Allan, on February 22, 2013, at 12:15 pm Health Edition reports that the Quebec Health Minister has decided not to renew the contract with RocklandMD, the private hospital that has done about 9,000 publicly funded surgeries since 2008 in Quebec. The contract expires September 2014. While the private clinics have tried to edge into the business via simpler surgeries, RocklandMD claims to be able to perform a broad range of day surgeries, “from the simplest to the most complex, in various specialities and within very short times.” The public health insurer found that RocklandMD was charging people illegal facility fees (a charge often leveled
. . . → Read More: Defending Public Healthcare: Private clinic deal ends badly while Ontario inks up more
By Greg Fingas, on February 14, 2013, at 9:04 am Here, on how a narrow focus on balancing budgets misses the more important story as to how our elected officials manage public money.
For further reading…- Paul Krugman makes a similar point with reference to happiness economics, while highlighting the particular value of stimulus within a depressed U.S. economy. – Ian Lovett reports on California’s proliferation of “capital appreciation bonds” as a prime example of the dangerous buy now, pay later approach, while Douglas Hainks points out that Miami’s new baseball stadium will escalate in cost from $91 million to $1.2 billion under a similar scheme.
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 2, 2013, at 10:45 am Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- Ray Grigg explains how Idle No More and other decentralized social movements may make for a crucial counterweight to the Harper Cons and their command-and-control philosophy: Systems are always bigger and more complex than the individuals who try to control them. So political systems, like ecological ones, can be influenced and guided for a while by the stringent and obsessive management of details, but the intricate convolutions within their countless interacting parts eventually expose the futility of such effort. This is now becoming apparent in the present Conservative government in Canada under the
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
By Stephen Elliott-Buckley, on January 30, 2013, at 12:00 pm
Should academic work be locked up like Disney[tm] artifacts?
I’ve been quite inspired by this very good analysis of the context surrounding Aaron Swartz’s suicide.
As news spread last week that digital rights activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself ahead of a federal trial on charges that he illegally downloaded a large database of scholarly articles with the intent to freely disseminate its contents, thousands of academics began posting free copies of their work online, coalescing around the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute.
via How academia betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz « The Berkeley Blog.
The willingness of scholars
. . . → Read More: Politics, Re-Spun: Aaron Swartz, Intellectual Property and the Public Good
By Guest Contributors, on January 28, 2013, at 12:00 pm By Rachel Goodine
The FSAs, or Foundation Skills Assessment tests, administered annually in British Columbia since 2000 to students in grades 4 and 7, are once again under way. They began on January 14 and will continue until February 22, 2013. In the meantime, the debate is on.
For many, it’s simple: How is testing our children and being notified of their progress a bad thing?
Well, that’s the problem. The BC Liberals are hoping the public will buy this overly simplistic defence of the FSAs. The Ministry of Education’s webpage states the tests will give a “snapshot” of student
. . . → Read More: Politics, Re-Spun: Foundation Skills Assessment: Another Dirty Trick
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