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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 14, 2013, at 11:23 am Last month, I wrote about the Sask Party’s choice to redefine “privacy” to apply to corporations under Saskatchewan’s securities legislation: Until now, privacy has been recognized under Canadian law as being an individual right. As Justice La Forest wrote, “An expression of an individual’s unique personality or personhood, privacy is grounded on physical and moral autonomy – the freedom to engage in one’s own thoughts, actions and decisions…” These core concepts – an individual’s unique personality, physical and moral autonomy, and freedom related to personal thoughts and actions – have no place whatsoever in discussing corporate interests.…(A) redefinition (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on May 11, 2013, at 12:35 pm 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…)
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 28, 2013, at 5:11 pm Erin is right to question Doug Elliott’s attempt to split hairs between a “slowdown” and a “deceleration”. But Elliott’s parsing ranks a distant second behind Russ Marchuk in the field of evasive dissembling.
Shorter Marchuk: It’s outrageous that anybody would suggest we’re imposing a disastrous policy like universal standardized testing on students. Instead, our policy is one of (flips through thesaurus) unified province-wide (flipflipflip) regular (flipflip) assessments for individual pupils. Which I’m sure you can see is something totally different.
By Greg Fingas, on April 26, 2013, at 9:40 am Assorted content to end your week.
- Sadly (if perhaps unsurprisingly), the Trudeau Libs’ vote with the Harper Cons against civil rights has received relatively little notice compared to the two parties’ attack ad posturing. But there’s still plenty worth reading on the subject – including another post from pogge, a discussion led by David Ball, and Michael Harris’ assessment as to the likely targets of Con-fueled hysteria in the years to come: (W)ith S-7 the law of the land, some dark possibilities present themselves in this country.
The federal government already has established five Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 25, 2013, at 11:04 am Yesterday, I offered a quick, off-the-cuff response to the Sask Party’s decision to restrict municipalities in applying property taxes to commercial and industrial land. But let’s look in a bit more detail at the warped economic theory Jim Reiter is spouting in defence of the move: “A very, very small minority of municipalities have been using mill rate factors to, in my view, excessively charge commercial and industrial properties,” Government Relations Minister Jim Reiter told reporters at the legislature this week.…
He noted that in some cases, such as with a pipeline, it would not be possible for a (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 Greg Fingas, on April 24, 2013, at 6:54 pm Boy, it’s reassuring to see the Sask Party lamenting the unfairness of a 15-fold difference in treatment between groups of landowners.
I’m sure they’ll be getting to Saskatchewan’s contribution to the 235-fold difference in salary between CEOs and the rest of us any day now.
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 John Klein, on April 17, 2013, at 3:38 pm The last remnants of a unique ecosystem on Earth are entering what is potentially their last years of natural existence. This will lead to the extinctions of some plants and animals that exist only on the Canadian prairies. Extinctions destabilize an ecosystem, and it’s an ecosystem where humans cannot be assured of long-term survival if it becomes destabilized.
The Conservatives removed protection for the community pastures in an apparent effort to privatize the land. The Sask Party, instead of putting the land under provincial management, has opted to sell off the land, following in the Conservative Party’s wishes. This is
. . . → Read More: Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff: Abandoned Community Pastures At Risk #cdnpoli #skpoli
By Greg Fingas, on April 15, 2013, at 11:28 am 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
By Greg Fingas, on April 11, 2013, at 9:59 am 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
By Greg Fingas, on April 9, 2013, at 9:20 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- Linda McQuaig tears into the Cons for exacerbating the gap between the too-rich-to-pay-taxes class and the rest of us: Ordinary citizens diligently spend hours calculating their income and deductions and meticulously filling out forms, fearful of the probing eye and relentless reach of the tax man. At the same time, some of our richest citizens quietly park billions of dollars on faraway islands where the sun delightfully reaches but the tax man delightfully doesn’t.
The enormity of the scam that tax havens offer the tax-evading rich — and the horrendous hole they
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on April 8, 2013, at 9:53 am Miscellaneous material to start your week.
- Michael Harris takes aim at Stephen Harper’s thugocracy: There is little that Stephen Harper has done that other prime ministers before him have not. But no one has used closure, time allocation, committee secrecy or omnibus legislation to a degree that renders Parliament itself irrelevant.
And he has done some other things that no prime minister ever has. He is the only one to have been found in contempt of Parliament. And has any federal government ever tabled a budget without also tabling the Planning and Priorities report? If the government’s spending details
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on April 7, 2013, at 1:07 pm Assorted content for your Sunday reading.
- Stephen Maher points out why we shouldn’t believe the Cons for a second when they claim to care about cracking down on offshore tax evasion: The top level of Canadian society is a small club, and it includes politicians. The people who run the country are on excellent terms with the business people who squirrel away money in offshore tax havens.
Shea’s meaningless tough talk was prompted by a CBC report that said Saskatchewan lawyer Tony Merchant has $1.7 million in a Cook Islands bank. Merchant’s wife, Pana, was appointed to the . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
By John Klein, on April 6, 2013, at 12:35 pm The expanded space for the ASC was launched on Thursday in the RIC building. Many dignitaries were on hand. Shawn Fraser was rep’ing the City, and gave a short and sweet 2 minute speech. Everyone else was a bit more verbose, but all heartfelt and excited by the newly christened space intended for all students to have a common gathering place with support staff nearby. The older space in College West remains part of the ASC.
The reception after had excellent food, including four kinds of bannock! Baked, baked with Saskatoon berries, fried, and fried with cheese.
–
I spoke
. . . → Read More: Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff: Aboriginal Students Centre Launch at UofR
By Greg Fingas, on April 5, 2013, at 11:17 am Assorted content to end your week.
- Frances Russell weighs in on the Cons’ continued contempt for democracy: The Conservatives under Stephen Harper are running an effective dictatorship. They believe they are quite within their rights to muzzle Parliament, gag civil servants, use taxpayer money for blatant political self-promotion, stand accused of trying to subvert a federal election and hand over much of Canada’s magnificent natural heritage to the multinational oil and gas lobby.
What is even more disturbing is that the national media, with a few notable exceptions, has underplayed or ignored these developments that are a clear assault
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on April 5, 2013, at 10:22 am Murray Mandryk’s Wednesday column serves as a downright painful example of Monday morning quarterbacking – cherry-picking examples from seven decades of Saskatchewan governments to criticize “rash decisions” without recognizing the difference between reasonable experimentation and blatant cronyism. And under Mandryk’s implicit standard for public-sector risk aversion (that if something could possibly prove to be anything less than an unqualified success, it’s not worth doing), Saskatchewan’s legislative assembly would be meeting around a donated table in a barn situated in the middle of the still-undeveloped prairie.
But Mandryk is far from the only voice suggesting that such a standard should apply
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On adaptation
By Greg Fingas, on April 2, 2013, at 9:31 am 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
By Greg Fingas, on March 30, 2013, at 5:23 pm 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
By Greg Fingas, on March 27, 2013, at 10:07 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Brendan Haley explains why the Cons’ let-them-build-pipelines economic approach is doomed to fail from the standpoint of prosperity as well as that of sustainability: There is a certain spirit of defensiveness and vulnerability behind the Conservatives’ economic choices. Ideologically incapable of admitting that the private sector can run into real problems, Flaherty pleads for corporations to start spending money again but has no policies aimed at making that happen. Unwilling to recognize the benefit of pro-active government policy the Conservatives see the bitumen sands as their sole salvation. Yet, such an economic trajectory
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on March 26, 2013, at 9:41 am 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
By Greg Fingas, on March 24, 2013, at 1:44 pm 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
By Greg Fingas, on March 14, 2013, at 9:51 am 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.
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