Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Ed Browne examines the differences between the Kraken variant and the forms of COVID-19 which have come before. Char Leung, Li Su and Munehito Machida study how transmission different types of venues in Japan was reflected in further spread. And Benjamin Mateus discusses the readily-available options to clear air of COVID and other pathogens which are being ignored in favour of a strategy of denial.

- Michael Howard discusses how a basic income would effectively eradicate the U.S.' persistent poverty problem (among other social ills). 

- Meanwhile, Edward Keenan asks why Toronto (like so many other municipalities) is using force to destroy temporary encampments, rather than putting any resources into ensuring people have a safe home.  And Jason Vermes talks to Kayla DeMong about the need for support programs which don't insist on a miraculous, single-handed recovery from substance addiction as a precondition to any help.

- Katie Pedersen, Virginia Smart and David Common report on soaring cell phone bills across most of Canada as a narrowing corporate oligopoly squeezes consumers for every possible nickel. And Clement Nocos makes the case for a national public telecom provider to ensure people aren't systematically ripped off.

- Finally, Andrew Leach highlights how work toward a just transition is intended to make sure people who have previously depended on a declining fossil fuel sector have viable options for the future - in stark contrast to the desire of the UCP, Saskatchewan Party and their backers to focus solely on wringing short-term profits, then stick the workers and citizens who are left with all of the cost and risk of cleaning up the mess left behind.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Supriya Dwivedi writes about the Groundhog Day-style loop we're trapped in due to a pandemic which is being allowed to continue and evolve. And while Daniel Wood and Geoff Brumfiel point out how the politicization of the pandemic is resulting in systematically higher death rates among Trump-supporting counties, Gaby Galvin reports on new polling showing that even in the U.S. a strong majority of the public favours doing far more to keep people healthy and safe - making the continued reluctance to do anything other than cater to the anti-social few all the more inexcusable. And Roni Caryn Rabin discusses how the pandemic has led to higher blood pressure among the public beyond anything traceable to the spread of the coronavirus.  

- Meanwhile, Karl Nerenberg calls out Canada's refusal to lift a finger to make vaccines more available around the globe. And Adeoluwa Atayero reports on Scott Moe's choice to put gratuitous barriers in the way of vaccinating children in schools. 

- Heather Rust exposes how the U.S.' corporate health care system is using worker burnout as an excuse to make conditions even worse for those trying to continue caring for patients, while Francis Racine reports on a warning from the Ontario Health Coalition that the Ford government is only increasing reliance on the private long-term care businesses who have caused so much avoidable suffering and death. And David Helps and Alexander Stephens point out that increased union organization and better conditions for workers are musts in order to rebuild a function economy and society. 

- Andrew Leach discusses how Alberta is past perceiving temporary oil price spikes as actual booms - suggesting that the fossil fuel industry's spin about being a source of wider prosperity has run its course everywhere but in the halls of power. Taylor Noakes rightly argues that we should be investing in a transition to a clean economy, rather than permitting and even subsidizing the continued destruction wrought by the existing oil and gas industry. And Kyle Bakx reports on the grim choice between maintaining the tailings ponds which have done so much damage to Alberta's land and wildlife, and allowing the companies responsible to release the water back into the broader environment.   

- Finally, Garret Ellison reports on the EPA's developing conclusion that there may be no safe level of several commonly-used bio-persistent chemicals. And Sasha Abramsky warns that the western U.S. may be on the verge of a drought that never ends. 

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Mariana Mazzucato responds to Boris Johnson by recognizing that capitalism has no viable answers for collective action problems such as the ones posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

- Scott Schmidt discusses how the familiar right-wing attempt to squeeze the wages and working conditions of public servants does nothing but harm to both the services we need, and the economy as a whole. And Fife Ogunde argues that the people providing services that we treat as essential deserve to be paid accordingly. 

- Owen Jones warns that our living environment can't survive the single-minded pursuit of immediate profit over the well-being of its inhabitants. Tariq Fancy discusses how sustainable investing in its current form falls far short of the mark in averting a climate breakdown. And Andrew Leach wonders whether the Supreme Court's decision upholding federal carbon pricing in Canada will represent the end of a loud and scientifically-illiterate resistance to climate policy.

- Adam Morton reports on a new study showing how Australia could reach net-zero emissions by 2040 with a transition to wind and solar power. And Dirk Meissner reports on British Columbia's steps to set emissions targets for industries and communities.

- Angus Reid's latest polling finds large numbers of Canadians facing financial insecurity both in general, and particularly in light of the coronavirus pandemic. 

- Finally, Lee Stevens examines the glaring gap between the social programs available in Alberta and the support needed to lift people out of poverty. And Jason Hickel highlights why there's reason to be skeptical of claims about the elimination of extreme poverty which depend on both questionable assumptions about past standards of living, and an an exceedingly low standard to define the term today.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Elaine Godfrey writes about Iowa's disastrous COVID-19 spread as a prime example of what happens when a government chooses to do nothing about a collective action problem. David Climenhaga compares Australia's successful strategy of containment and clear direction to Alberta's calamitous reliance on personal responsibility to paper over a refusal to take action. And Adam Hunter contrasts Scott Moe's insistence on pitching the relaxation of public health standards against the alarming reality of Saskatchewan's second wave. 

- BBC News reports on Argentina's wealth tax which has been passed to ensure that COVID benefits are funded by those who can most afford to pitch in. Christo Aivalis writes that the Libs, Cons and Bloc have shown who they work for by voting down the NDP's modest wealth tax proposal - even as Luke Savage points out that Canada's wealthiest few are accumulating all the more wealth by profiteering off a pandemic.

- Oliver Moore and Shane Dingman report that Toronto is the next Canadian city examining a vacant house tax to ensure that housing is used proportionately more to meet human needs, and less as an investment vehicle. But Douglas Todd writes about the role of hidden foreign money in inflating the gap between Vancouver's incomes and housing prices. And Tim Kiladze notes that apartment buildings are the next targets for capital in seeking to turn needed homes into fully-exploited profit centres.

- Finally, Andrew Leach discusses how Alberta's reliance on regular oil booms looks to be sorely out of date.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- The CCPA Monitor interviews William Carroll about the fossil fuel elite's control over far too much of Canadian politics, and the barrier that creates to any meaningful climate action. And Thomas Gunton takes note of the reality that new pipeline projects can't be justified on any economic basis (other than a belief that dirty fossil fuels should somehow be singled out for subsidies), while contributing to readily-avoidable harm to our planet. 

- Meanwhile, Andrew Leach and Blake Shaffer write that Alberta's transition away from coal power has been a resounding success in reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and energy costs. 

- Kenny Stancil reports on yet another planetary temperature record caused by our climate breakdown, with September 2020 ranking as the hottest one in recorded history.

- David Climenhaga writes that the UCP's health-care cuts - like most austerity schemes - figure to produce far less savings than promised (at far greater expense to public well-being). And in a prime example of what happens when we let corporations dictate the terms of access to health care, Ryan Tumilty reports on threats by Big Pharma to abandon Canadian patients if we don't agree to pay exorbitant prices. 

- Finally, Luke Savage writes about the liberal propensity to declare elections matters of life and death while then pleading an inability to change anything for the better if they happen to win power.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Andrew Leach and Martin Olszynski go into detail about the calculations around the Teck Frontier mine - and particularly how any pricing assumptions which could make development viable are far out of date.

- Kate Yoder points out how the fossil fuel industry has been producing massive amounts of fake news among its other forms of pollution. And Jen Gerson weighs in on the laughable propaganda emanating from the UCP's war room.

- Meanwhile, PressProgress documents the connections between the kamikaze campaign which helped install Jason Kenney in power, and the UCP's attempts to have the federal government foot the bill for orphan oil well liabilities which would otherwise fall on some high-profile party funders.

- Martin Lukacs and Shiri Pasternak report on the nearly immediate attempt by businesses and the B.C. government to abolish Aboriginal title as soon as it was recognized by the Supreme Court. And Andrew Nikiforuk discusses how Canada's colonial legacy continues in the forcible takeover of Wet’suwet’en land.

- Finally, David Moscrop writes about the need for protest to challenge injustice built into the status quo. And Emily Riddle offers a reminder that we can fully expect police forces to defend entrenched power.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Kate Aronoff asks how much destruction is needed before we'll start taking climate change seriously - though the answer at this point looks to be that no amount of damage will be enough to move a substantial number of politicians off their insistence on putting fossil fuel extraction ahead of human well-being.

- Andrew Leach highlights the contrast between the real problems with Alberta's oil sector, and the Conservative talking points insisting that a dirty and costly industry will boom again if only people clap louder for it.

- David Climenhaga discusses how Jason Kenney has laid the groundwork to slash and privatize Alberta's health and education systems to fund corporate tax giveaways. Ricardo Tranjan maps out the per-student cuts faced by Ontario's schools under Doug Ford. And PressProgress notes that Brian Pallister's self-proclaimed achievements include saddling Manitoba with Canada's second-worst ER wait times even while slashing the number of emergency rooms accessible in the first place.

- Finally, P.E. Moskowitz writes about the far right's attempt to squelch all views other than their own in the name of "free speech".

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Seth Klein summarizes new polling showing that Canadians are eager for far stronger action to fight climate change than the Libs or Cons will even consider. And Andrew Leach points out that the Cons' excuse for a climate plan is a study in vagueness whose few discernable elements are contrary to Andrew Scheer's apparent goals.

- Meanwhile, Jason Warick reports on the potential for severe water shortages caused by a climate breakdown - including in much of Saskatchewan.

- Ann Carlson discusses why oil companies are trying desperately to avoid answering for their deception about the dangers of carbon emissions. And Sam Levin exposes how Monsanto has tried to attack and smear anybody who dares to share factual information about the connections between its products and health risks including cancer.

- Alex Drummond reports on the safety risks of Ontario's underresourced emergency rooms.

- Finally, Will Hutton is optimistic that the exclusionary right-wing world order is approaching its expiry date. But Stephen Maher writes about Quebec's Bill 21 as a vivid example of the cost of bigotry as long as it's allowed to reign supreme.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Bob Rivett highlights the fact that climate protesters are motivated by the desire to save our world from the reckless corporations and politicians who are prepared to sacrifice it for short-term gain. The Associated Press reports that Chile's coast is the site of the latest uncontained oil spill, while Jimmy Thomson takes note of Constantine North's plans to contaminate Alaska's environment. Leah Stokes writes about Ohio's appalling combination of dirty fossil fuel bailouts and relaxed emission requirements. And Tom Phillips reports on Jair Bolsonaro's determination to destroy the Amazon and the Indigenous people who inhabit it.

- Jonathon Gatehouse fact-checks the NDP's climate change plan and finds that it's entirely possible to deliver the 300,000 jobs in the process of transitioning to a sustainable society. And in contrast, Andrew Leach points out the implausible (and indeed outright contradictory) claims behind Elizabeth May's energy plans.

- Stephen Leahy points out the environmental dangers - and other avoidable difficulties - created by the spread of clamshell plastic packaging.

- Wanda Thomas Bardnard writes that prisons are only exacerbating the problems they're supposed to solve by failing to prepare residents for their eventual release.

- And finally, PressProgress warns that the UCP's attacks on social programs include slashing funding for school breakfasts to hungry children.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Geoff Dembicki interviews Leah Gazan about the need to put people over corporate profits in our political system.

- Dale Eisler writes about the need for our conversation around climate change to focus on an honest appraisal as to how we can rein in carbon emissions. But Jason Markusoff points out how petro-jingoism is drowning out any willingness to consider the massive costs of continued fossil fuel extraction. And Paul Willcocks highlights the glaring partisan divide which has seen conservative parties tamp down any interest in acting to avert a climate crisis.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Leach observes that the right-wing strategy of opposing consumer-level pricing and incentives only figures to ensure that more of the cost of any action will be incurred by the extraction industry and other major emitters.

- Ian Austen looks back at the causes of the Lac-Mégantic explosion - and the minimal regulatory response so far.

- Finally, Ricardo Tranjan calls out the Ford government's stinginess in slashing funding for a seniors' transit tax credit. And Leyland Cecco discusses Innisfil's disastrous experiment replacing public transit with ride-sharing which has increased both costs and pollution.

New column day

Here, on how Brad Wall's call for Canada to stop funding international climate change adaptation and mitigation reflects just one more example of his government's tendency to kick down at the people least able to defend themselves.

For further reading...
- Gregory Beatty again documented the background to Wall's abandonment of an equalization system which would properly account for resources (in favour of a climate change policy intended to ignore the pollution they generate).
- For details on Canada's international climate contributions, see here.
- Howard Leeson writes about the futility of Wall's choice to literally tilt at windmills. And for noteworthy comments on Wall's plan itself, see the responses by Andrew Leach, Mark Cameron and Christopher Ragan, the Pembina Institute, and Murray Mandryk.
- Finally, key comments on the Wall government's latest cuts to social supports can be found here and here. And CBC reports on protests against the Saskatchewan Party's cuts to disability programs.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Andrew Leach's after-the-fact addendum to his review of Alberta's climate change policy offers an important reminder as to the costs of inaction on climate change - and the message is one which applies equally to other jurisdictions which are seen as climate laggards:

Our emissions do not simply come from our large industries—almost everything else we do has greenhouse gas emissions impacts, whether it’s driving our cars and trucks, heating our homes, or purchasing goods delivered here by plane, truck or train. Reducing emissions in Alberta will not be easy—we don’t have a magic wand, and if cost-effective, lower-emissions substitutes were available in all cases today, we wouldn’t be facing this problem. But, not reducing emissions in Alberta is also potentially very costly. We’ve already seen policies and actions aimed at our resource sector whether through the rejection of pipelines, the application of low carbon fuel standards, or challenges to companies investing here from their shareholders or from sustainable investors. If Alberta chooses not to act, those costs won’t go away. And, we’re part of a federation, and our federation has committed to an ambitious target to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions. There will be costs if Alberta is not a constructive partner in those efforts—continued market access challenges or unfavourable policy design. Those costs may be difficult to quantify, but that doesn’t mean they’re not real. Finally, of course, we know that emissions impose costs on others around the world—if we use the most recent estimates, we are each imposing on average $2,800 to $4,500 worth of costs on current and future global citizens every year with our emissions, and many of these impacts affect some of the poorest countries on earth.
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(T)he business-as-usual case that a modeller might use to assess the costs of these actions does not exist for Alberta. We see today increasing pressure on firms to mitigate carbon risk, increasing pressure on governments to achieve their Paris commitments, and increasing focus on Alberta as a symbol of inaction on climate change. We do not see how a comparison to a case where Alberta can continue to find viable markets for its products and see investment return to the oil sands in the absence of credible action on greenhouse gases exists. What would likely exist as an alternative is a world where Alberta faces increasingly discriminatory and punitive policies and barriers to trade both from within and from outside Canada, and where firms face mounting shareholder and institutional investor pressure not to invest in Alberta. The costs of these are speculative, and more difficult to quantify, but we are confident that they far and away exceed the cumulative costs of the actions we’ve recommend. 

- Meanwhile, Larry Buhl reports on widespread wage theft by the U.S.' oil industry.

- Rejean Hebert makes the case for publicly-funded home care and long term care to avoid the need to use our hospital care system to address disabilities and chronic conditions.

- Charles Smith points out the dangerous (if consistent) precedent set by the Saskatchewan Party's refusal to fund the contract it negotiated with Saskatchewan's teachers.

- Finally, Martin Regg Cohn traces the path toward an expanded Canada Pension Plan. And Mark Hancock writes that an improved CPP needs to produce a more secure retirement for everybody, rather than being whittled down to nothing by exceptions and carve-outs.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Paul Krugman highlights the policy areas where we need to look to the public sector for leadership - including those such as health care and income security where we all have a strong interest in making sure that nobody's left behind. And Andre Picard reminds us of one of the major gaps in Canada's health care system, as expensive prescription drugs can make for a devastating barrier to needed care.

- Meanwhile, Paul Buchheit duly criticizes the combination of increasing wealth for the lucky few in the U.S., and increasing poverty at the bottom of the income scale.

- Warren Bell looks back at the years of deliberate attacks on environmental protection that led to the English Bay oil spill crisis, while Tim Harper argues that Canada's federal government would be a great place to start cleaning up the mess. Kai Nagata notes that public outcry over exactly the types of issues raised by English Bay may have succeeded in stopping the Northern Gateway pipeline. And Andrew Leach rightly makes the point that Stephen Harper bears personal responsibility for Canada's pattern of delay and denial on greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector:

Over the course of the prime minister’s time in office, oil prices have gone from the $50s to the $140s, down to the $30s, back above $100, back to the $40s and sit around $50 today. We’ve had proposals for regulations, cap-and-trade, and regulations again, but it seems that no policy which would restrict GHG emissions from the oil sands can get to the finish line. Why? It’s not prices, and it’s not the oil and gas lobby. It’s one thing – a prime minister who, to use MacDougall’s words, hasn’t seen fit to instruct, “the entire team (to put) its shoulder to the wheel until victory is achieved,” and a policy is imposed.

Stephen Harper is happy to see these difficult policy choices pushed to a later date and, in so doing, will have us make exactly the mistakes he said we wouldn’t make again – promising aggressive action and not delivering it. When the world meets in Paris in late 2015, Canada will still likely not have policies imposed on its oil sands sector and, despite the oil price crash, will still expect emissions to increase far beyond our Copenhagen commitment. Will the world, again, be willing to take the word of a prime minister, whoever it may be, who says we won’t make the same mistake three times?

- Scott Clark and Peter DeVries see the Cons' false balanced budget legislation as being absolutely hilarious in light of their track record of fiscal mismanagement. But Rick Smith notes that the Cons' anti-labour zealotry is rather less amusing - particularly as C-377 gets pushed through the legislative process yet again (minus the amendments which would have made it at least somewhat less toxic).

- Finally, Brent Patterson offers yet another example of how trade agreements can severely limit democratic decision-making, as Argentina stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars for prioritizing usable water above a profiteer's revenue stream.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- David Macdonald studies Canada's massive (and growing) wealth gap, and proposes some thoughtful solutions to ensure that growth in wealth results in at least some shared benefits:

Attempting to limit inequality through traditional measures like restricting RRSP contributions or introducing new tax brackets for high income individuals generally won’t apply to substantial wealth holdings. The wealth generated by The Wealthy 86 was done through creating or trading assets, mostly companies, not through saving and investing money in the middle-class sense.

One the largest legal loopholes for the wealthy in Canada is that capital gains are taxed at half the rate of normal income. If one Canadian makes $100,000 a year selling a company while another makes $100,000 a year working at a job, the worker will pay twice the tax of the business seller. Capital gains have an “inclusion rate” of 50%, meaning only 50% of the original total counts as income for tax purposes. Capital gains tax rates vary tremendously between OECD countries. Canada’s rate is presently not as high as France or Germany, but it is higher than countries like Austria that have no tax at all on capital gains. Canada also does not levy differential rates on short term speculation vs. longer term investing.

A combination of a higher inclusion rate and higher income taxes at the top of the income scale could go part way to offset the flood of wealth that is accumulating in the pockets of Canada’s wealthiest and ensure some of those benefits are returned to the majority of Canadians.

- Meanwhile, Canadians for Tax Fairness are encouraging citizens to demand a closer look at how much money is being lost to tax evasion. And Christopher Flavelle asks how much poverty a wealthy country should be willing to allow - recognizing in the process that we have a choice whether to condemn fellow Canadians to poverty, and that the Cons' preference has been to do so.

- PressProgress notes that the International Labour Office has taken the time to call out the Fraser Institute for equating attacks on workers with economic opportunity. Now if only Canada's media would do the same more often rather than serving as a resistance-free distribution channel for anti-labour messages.

- Andrew Leach reminds us that there are substantial risks involved in relying on the tar sands as Canada's sole engine for future growth. Mark Bittman expresses his rightful disbelief that we're failing to do anything meaningful to combat climate change even as the latest IPCC report identifies growing dangers to people around the world. And Linda McQuaig discusses the politics which have led to that inaction:

By focusing on the alleged failure of ordinary people to tackle climate change, we take our eyes off the real culprits behind the drapes — the fossil fuel industry and lickspittle governments, the best example being the one in Ottawa.

Big Fossil is the wealthiest and most powerful lobby in world history. Any serious attempt to tackle climate change would involve it giving up future profits that are truly staggering.

That’s because, according to the International Energy Agency and other authoritative sources, at least two-thirds of the world’s fossil fuel reserves will have to stay in the ground if there’s to be any hope of meeting the widely-agreed target of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius. (So far we’ve warmed the planet by just 0.8 degrees and that seems to be working out just fine, right?)
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Canada’s role in the climate debacle is particularly galling, given that we are sitting on one of the world’s biggest and dirtiest deposits of oil.

It’s a horrific bit of bad luck that, at this crucial moment in history, with time running out on the climate change clock, the world community is stuck with an aggressively renegade government in Ottawa, whose crass loyalty to Big Oil has made Canada part of the machinery of obstruction.

Stephen Harper’s government has undermined international climate negotiations, gutted Canada’s environmental review process, targeted environmental groups with harassing audits and championed unbridled oilsands development.

- Finally, Richard Seymour comments on how the right also managed to pitch austerity as the only option in the face of economic instability which in fact demanded public investment.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Dean Starkman writes about the media's failure to see and report on the culture of corruption and manipulation that led to the 2008 economic meltdown:

Was the brewing crisis really such a secret? Was it all so complex as to be beyond the capacity of conventional journalism and, through it, the public to understand? Was it all so hidden? In fact, the answer to all those questions is “no.” The problem—distorted incentives corrupting the financial industry—was plain, but not to Wall Street executives, traders, rating agencies, analysts, quants, or other financial insiders. It was plain to the outsiders: state regulators, plaintiffs’ lawyers, community groups, defrauded mortgage borrowers, and, mostly, to former employees of financial institutions, the whistleblowers, who were, in fact, blowing the whistle. A few reporters actually talked to them, understood the metastasizing problem, and wrote about it. You’ll meet a couple of them in this book. Unfortunately, they didn’t work for the mainstream business press.
...
To read various journalistic accounts of mortgage lending and Wall Street during the bubble is to come away with radically differing representations of the soundness of the U.S. financial system. It all depended on what you were reading. Anyone “paying attention” to the conventional business press could be forgiven for thinking that things were, in the end, basically normal. Yes, there was a housing bubble. Any fair reading of the press of the era makes that clear, even if warnings were mitigated by just-as-loud celebrations of the boom. And yes, the press said there were a lot of terrible mortgage products out there. Those are important consumer and investor issues. But that’s all they are. When the gaze turned to financial institutions, the message was entirely different: “all clear.” It’s not just the puff pieces (“Washington Mutual Is Using a Creative Retail Approach to Turn the Banking World Upside Down”; “Citi’s chief hasn’t just stepped out of Sandy Weill’s shadow—he’s stepped out of his own as he strives to make himself into a leader with vision”; and so on) or the language that sometimes lapses into toadying (“Some of its old-world gentility remains: Goldman agreed to talk for this story only reluctantly, wary of looking like a braggart”; “His 6-foot-4 linebacker-esque frame is economically packed into a club chair in his palatial yet understated office”): it’s that even stories that were ostensibly critical of individual Wall Street firms and mortgage lenders described them in terms of their competition with one another: would their earnings be okay? There was a bubble all right, and the business press was in it.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Leach comments on the Harper Cons' own carbon bubble - as a government relentlessly pushing tar sands development seems utterly oblivious to the reality that further development could become non-viable based on a readily-foreseeable (and indeed necessary) change in climate policy.

- Rick Mercer rants about the Cons' fixation on income splitting - and how it shows they couldn't care less about anybody who doesn't share their own privileged lifestyle:


- And Doug Cuthand observes that First Nations have been particularly marginalized based on their failure to fit into the Cons' target demographics:

Funding has been eliminated to the following groups since the Harper government came to power: Sisters in Spirit, NAHO, the National Aboriginal Health Organization, The First Nations Statistical Institute and NWAC, Native Women's Association of Canada. Virtually all the aboriginal political organizations experienced funding cuts this year.

We cannot forget the failure of this government to honour the Kelowna Accord that would have injected more than $5 billion into a series of First Nations initiatives, including housing, education health and economic development.

In addition to the cuts to the political organizations, First Nations administrations have seen budget cuts ranging from 10 per cent to 25 per cent. A clause has been inserted in tribal council funding agreements that none of their grant allocations can be used for "advocacy or political activities."

How the Department of Colonial Affairs plans to police this is beyond me. You can't have a group of chiefs in a room without them discussing political issues.

The government views tribal councils only as service providers. In other words, it sees tribal councils replacing the Department of Indian Affairs and becoming the new Indian Agents. The days of participatory democracy are but a memory. The Harper government wants to control the agenda, and any group that provides an independent or contradictory voice is suspect.

In addition to the cutbacks to First Nations organizations, institutions and services, we now have the "Fair Elections Act" that is attacking our democratic rights as Canadians. The removal of the vouching for voters without proper ID could be problematic for First Nations voters.
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This leads me to conclude that the Conservatives have given up on us as supporting them in the next election. They have cut our funding to the bone, and now they are reducing our impact at the ballot box. Is this Harper's war on Indians?

- Finally, Tim Harford notes that too much reliance on "big data" can lead to massive mistakes when institutions fail to recognize the limits on what a particular set of information actually tells us.

Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Chris Hall notes that Brad Butt's admitted fabrications can only hurt the Cons' already-lacking credibility when it comes to forcing through their unfair elections legislation. And Ed Broadbent sums up what's at stake as the Cons try to rewrite the rules to prioritize their own hold on power over public participation and the fair administration of elections:

Inspired by the tried and tested voter suppression tactics used by the Republicans to disenfranchise marginalized groups in the U.S., the new election law would make it harder for certain groups to vote. The law would end the ability to “vouch” for the bona fides of a neighbour, a tool that allowed 120,000 voters — disproportionately aboriginal, youth and seniors — to cast ballots in the last election.
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The move is part of a broader sweep of changes that also serves to suppress the vote. For example, the new law will remove the ability of electors to use voter identification cards. Elections Canada had only in the last few years piloted the use of the cards to make it easier to cast a ballot at polling sites serving seniors’ residences, long-term care facilities, aboriginal reserves and on-campus student residences. The conclusion of this pilot project was that the “initiative made the voter identification process run more smoothly and reduced the need to ask the responsible authorities for letters of attestation of residence.”

In other words, voter identification cards had been successful in enfranchising these groups. Conservative MP Brad Butt, a member of the committee dealing with this measure, has been compelled to retract a completely fabricated story he had told in the House about this so-called fraud. Despite his apparent breach of parliamentary privilege, the Conservatives rejected an opposition bid to have a House committee look into Butt’s false claims that he saw voter identification cards stolen from recycling boxes to commit fraud.
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Having spent more than two decades in the House of Commons, I can think of no prime minister who has been so focused on undermining electoral participation and public debate.

We have a tradition of Conservatives, New Democrats and Liberals respecting everyone’s right to have a say. Past governments have avoided turning democratic process into a tool for one party’s advantage. Changes in electoral processes were always based on all-party consensus.

That Harper derides such all-party consensus is, sadly, no surprise. That his robotic backbench will unquestioningly obey is not news either. Except now, the victims of his disregard for debate aren’t only the people we elect. It’s those doing the electing as well.

- Meanwhile, Kathryn May discusses the witch-hunt mindset behind Mark Adler's bill to attack the partisan activity of anyone who is, or might want to become, a public servant.

- Stephen Maher looks at the Cons' data mining from Aga Khan's visit, while Susan Delacourt reminds us that a complete lack of checks on partisan use of information allows all parties to carry out similar data collection efforts.

- Andrew Leach offers some rare recognition of Brad Wall's fundamental lack of anything useful or coherent to say - in this case, on the subject of Keystone XL and environmental policy:

On new regulations, however, one environmental economist said Wall's logic defeats itself.

If the whole point of introducing rules is to convince the Americans you're doing something on climate change, and then you insist on weak rules so the oil industry isn't affected, he said, isn't there a conflict there?

"In some ways those arguments feed into the opposition," said Andrew Leach, a professor at the University of Alberta and a former federal official. "Then you're essentially saying exactly what the (Keystone) opponents are saying."

Leach said that kind of mixed messaging has been typical of the Keystone debate.

He said it's been similar with the Alberta government, which went from calling the pipeline indispensable to the expansion of the industry to now suggesting it won't really make a difference.

- And finally, Robyn Leach points out that the oil industry is using a glaring regulatory loophole to avoid environmental scrutiny for massive project expansions.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Don Lenihan is the latest to highlight the difference between citizens and consumers - as well as why we should want to act as the former:

In the old view, public debate is all about defining the public interest by establishing collective needs. This requires a very different view of public debate. Rather than seeing it as a chance to advance my wants, it asks me, as a citizen, to consider the needs of the community. This means I must listen to others, weigh their claims, examine the evidence, and make trade-offs and compromises.

When Delacourt talks about citizens having once had a sense of the common good or being willing to make sacrifices for it, we don’t need to believe there was once a golden age of civic participation to agree with her.

The real point is that, not so long ago, citizens had a much clearer sense of their responsibility—as citizens—to balance their personal wants against the public good. Rob Ford’s proclivity to treat citizens first and foremost as taxpayers—and Ford Nation’s inclination to respond—shows just how far we have strayed from this vision.

- Andrew Leach offers his take on what the National Energy Board's rubber-stamping of Northern Gateway means. And Stephen Hume points out the absurdity of the Cons' carefully-scripted process.

- Meanwhile, having managed to eliminate environmental considerations from the Gateway's environmental review process, Stephen Harper has once again kicked any possible greenhouse gas emission regulations past the next federal election. That may break the streak of consecutive "next year!" promises before it reaches an even ten - but it also seems to leave no room for any pretense that a Con government will ever regulate the oil sector.

- Andrew Jackson calls out the Cons' doublespeak on the affordability of a secure pension system. And John Geddes identifies Stephen Harper's pension rhetoric as yet another example of the Cons' beggar-thy-neighbour, every-man-for-himself philosophy.

- Finally, CAUT finds that a strong majority of Canadians both support and recognize the need for unions - while only the predictable 28% would rather see unions and workers silenced.

On shortsighted assumptions

Time for a true or false pop quiz. Is the following a self-evident statement of economic fact?

"A capital asset which is not currently being exploited has a value of zero for all purposes."

I only ask because that seems to be the fundamental assumption behind Andrew Leach's cost-benefit analysis comparing raw bitumen mining to upgrading. And unfortunately, Leach's viewpoint seems to fit all too well with the current resource management philosophy of provincial and federal governments alike.

Here's Leach's conclusion as to a hypothetical set of developments - one involving an extraction project alone, one an attached upgrader:

On a per-barrel basis, the numbers are equally ambiguous – in fact, you’d probably say that the upgrader looks better. Revenues per barrel of bitumen extracted are higher with the upgrader, at an average of $80.80 per barrel vs. $62.93 for the mining project alone. Average costs (capital, debt, and operating costs combined) are higher for the integrated project, at $43 per barrel of bitumen produced and upgraded versus $29.15 for the mine, while royalties and taxes are similar at around $19 per barrel of produced bitumen in both cases. The result is that the upgrader earns higher cumulative cash flows, by $4.10, per barrel of bitumen produced.
...
There’s also a trick in the per-barrel numbers above – the project with an upgrader earns higher cash flow per barrel, but it produces far fewer barrels—1.7 billion fewer. So, over the life of the two projects, the total royalties and taxes collected from mining and upgrading combined versus bitumen extraction alone would be lower by $36.6 billion, while the profits to the producer would be lower by $13.4 billion. Combined, for a similar capital investment and with similar associated jobs, the bitumen extraction project returns $50 billion more in royalties, taxes, and profits.

But how much of a "trick" is it to recognize that the upgrader project leaves an additional 1.7 billion barrels of oil in the ground to be produced - providing an opportunity for further development once the single proposed project is in its operations phase?

That question is particularly important in light of the Cons' usual message around oil transportation. The Harper line is of course that every drop of oil will ultimately be squeezed out of the tar sands - and if anybody questions a particular pipeline or tanker traffic scheme, the Cons will instead approve a balloon-and-catapult system to launch dilbit in the general direction of Shenzhen, with the resulting splashback covering the entire northern hemisphere to be explained away by a vigorous chant of "ethical oil!".

By the same token, if it's true that accessible tar sands reserves will ultimately be fully developed (with some public policy desire to brand Canada as an "energy superpower" serving as an excuse to bridge gaps in actual demand), then the appropriate means of evaluating the resulting benefit is precisely the per-barrel calculation rejected by Leach - even if it takes somewhat longer to get there.

Alternatively (and more plausibly), one can ask whether other developments might make further extraction uneconomical at some point in the future. But surely the risk of changed economic conditions represents at most a basis for partially discounting the value of reserves in the ground - not a valid reason to assign them a giant zero, or consider any acknowledgement of their existence as a "trick".

Unfortunately, far too many people seem willing to assume our land and resources have no value in their current state - resulting in our accepting minimal royalties and massive environmental damage as the price of immediate extraction. And while it may not be easy to assign an exact price to that which doesn't get ripped out of the ground, it's not at all difficult to see how the zero-value assumption is wrong on its face.

[Edit: fixed typo.]

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Don Braid comments on Alberta's complete lack of credibility when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental issues. And Andrew Leach nicely sums up the PC/Con position in trying to put a happy face on growing emissions:

Suppose you run into an old friend whom you haven’t seen for some time. You notice that he looks a little thicker than you remembered around the waist, but, since you aren’t one of those academics who shuns basic manners, you keep mum.

“How are you doing?” you say, “What’s new?”

His response leaves you shocked: “I feel great!” he tells you, “I’ve lost 20 pounds.”

Despite your best efforts, you can’t hide your scepticism.

“It’s simple, really,” he says. “On the path I was on — eating chicken wings and drinking beer almost every day — I would surely have gained 40 pounds in no time. I stuck to my plan, though, and by having wings and beer only on weekends, I gained a mere 20 pounds. Who would have thought you could drink beer, eat chicken wings, and still lose weight!”

Sounds like an absurd calculation, doesn’t it? This type of thinking, though, is the bread-and-butter of discussions about greenhouse gas policies — it’s called a reduction relative to business-as-usual.

- And for those looking for a way out of Canada's staples trap which has done to much to distort discussion about economic and environmental issues, Daniel Drache offers a road map - if one that may not be easily followed:

In Canada, we must build a very different policy environment to escape the modern staples trap and address the imbalances of fixed overhead costs, mountains of debt, and over-investment in unsustainable mega projects. Other countries have successfully climbed out of the staples trap, altering their economic trajectories. A survey of this experience suggests that seven conditions need to be met.

First, there must be a champion inside the political class to make it happen: such as a latter day Walter Gordon or Eric Kierans. Second, there must be a strategic purpose and moral compass for environmental and redistributive goals. Third, the country must possess a valuable commodity that gives the state the leverage to negotiate new resource revenue sharing with MNCs (revenues which in turn are recycled to support broader development goals). Fourth, the country needs a modern infrastructure. Fifth, public opinion must be on side to demand fundamental policy changes. Sixth, there need to be credible new ideas to transform the “resource curse” into a blessing. This requires a strategy to use resources as a driver of domestic growth and diversification, competitive industries, and strong job-creation. The final ingredient, of course, is luck. Here, timing is key: the optimal moment to introduce a national energy policy is during the upswing of a commodity boom, when the state has optimal leverage with banks and resource players.

- Ethan Roeder explains how the Obama 2012 campaign used detailed data analysis to get a better picture of voters than its competition.

- CUPE discusses how the Cons continue to keep Canadians in the dark about CETA by substituting for its actual text. And Julian Beltrame reports on a study showing that the added prescription drug costs caused by CETA will far outweigh any reductions in tariffs (not to mention that the increased price will flow to big pharma rather than toward public coffers).

- Finally, Sean Holman introduces a new series testing the limits of government accountability in Canada:

It's easy to disagree with such opacity -- making it easy, as Legault has, to conclude that freedom of information is the expression of our core values.

Yet I wonder how many Canadians would disagree with the assumption that privacy is necessary for decision-making?

Because once you accept that assumption, as many of our political leaders have, it becomes easier to reject requests for information about such decisions.

What that says about our core values is admittedly debatable. It suggests freedom of information is not an expression of those values or, at the very least, that we have conflicting values.

But what's undeniable is that at the beginning of the 21st century, we find ourselves residents of an unknowable country.

It is a nation of the governed rather than the self-governed -- a place where transparency is routinely sacrificed on the high altar of peace, order and what some would call good governance.

New column day

Here, on how "we must increase stock prices!" - or worse yet, "we must increase company X's stock prices!" - makes for a thoroughly regressive public policy goal.

For further reading...
- The examples referenced in the column include Carol Goar's column threatening a revolt over telecom share prices, and Andrew Leach's piece about oil sands production costs (which at least acknowledges royalties as another concern beyond the hope that some profits might find their way into pension funds).
- The wealth distribution data mentioned in the column is found in Armine Yalnizyan's The Rise of the Richest 1% and sources cited therein, as well as Marc Lee's Wealth and income in the top 1%.
- And finally, both Dave Coles and Thomas Walkom make the case for expanded public providers to improve both competition and public returns in the telecom sector.