The latest round of discussion about the possibility of a coalition to offer something better than the Harper Cons seems to have taken an noteworthy turn. At this point, everybody but the Libs seems to have settled on the position that there’s no real obstacle to a coalition government –
Continue readingTag: Andrew Coyne
BigCityLib Strikes Back: The National Post Should Fire That Anti-Vaxxer Prick
National Post columnist Lawrence Solomen is now running an anti-vaxxer website. You can see it here. This is from the “About us” section: VaccineFactCheck, headed by Lawrence Solomon, is a project of Consumer Policy Institute. The “Consumer Policy Institute” is also just more Solomon, another part of his “Energy Probe”
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Tavia Grant, Bill Curry and David Kennedy discuss CIBC’s analysis showing that Canadian job quality has falled to its lowest level recorded in the past 25 years: Several reports have concluded that the country’s job market is not as strong as it looks
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Danyaal Raza highlights how Canadians can treat an election year as an opportunity to discuss the a focus on social health with candidates and peers alike: Health providers are increasingly recognizing that while a robust health care system is an important part of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On motivating factors
Andrew Coyne offers what’s probably the most reasonable argument to treat the negligible threat of terrorism differently from the other risks we so readily accept (and indeed which are regularly exacerbated by deregulation). But Coyne’s argument falls well short of justifying the response actually on offer from the Cons –
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Larry Elliott writes that at least some business leaders are paying lip service to the idea that inequality needs to be reined in. But Alec Hogg points out that at least some of the privileged few are using their obscene wealth to remove
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On limited victories
Truly, I wish Andrew Coyne’s latest actually described policy-making in Canada, and not merely the state of theoretical political debate. But in fact, we live in a country where “let’s consider whether a trade agreement actually has benefits, rather than signing whatever gets shoved in front of us” has been
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Mr. Trudeau: Coalitions are what you make them
Let’s talk coalition … The recent poll showing that most Liberal and NDP supporters would rather have a new government than have a Harper one after the 2015 election, even if this means some form of a coalition, has sparked renewed talk about the possibility of a coalition. One problem
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On representative units
Does anybody remember which particularly prominent political pundit went far out his way to trumpet the idea that basic unit of political legitimacy is the caucus – to the point of repeatedly advocating a legislated requirement that a caucus vote override the decisions made by the whole of a party’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, taking a quick look at Canada’s options for electoral reform while arguing that an MMP system would create far better incentives for our political leaders than the alternatives. For further reading…– Alison wrote about our options in advance of yesterday’s vote on the NDP’s electoral reform proposal. – Eric
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Paul Krugman writes that the ultra-wealthy’s contempt for anybody short of their own class is becoming more and more explicit around the globe – even when it comes to basic rights like the ability to vote: It’s always good when leaders tell the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Joseph Heath responds to Andrew Coyne in noting that an while there’s plenty of room (and need) to better tax high personal incomes, there’s also a need to complement that with meaningful corporate taxes: (A) crucial part of the Boadway and Tremblay
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Things We Learned During Ontario Election 2014: Conservative Ideologues Should Be Convulsed With Doubt And Self-Loathing
Take Andrew Coyne, for example. This guy is known among Canada’s literati as “the journalist who knows math”. He’s always saying “Well, the iron laws of Economics will prevent that!” and so forth. And when he says it what he means is that your figgers don’t add up. So what
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Richard Shillington studies the Cons’ income-splitting scheme for the Broadbent Institute, and finds that it’s even more biased toward the wealthy than previously advertised: • The average benefit of income splitting across all households is only $185, though nine out of 10
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Robert Reich proposes that the best way to address corporate criminality is to make sure that those responsible go to jail – rather than simply being able to pay a fine out of corporate coffers and pretend nothing ever happened. – And
Continue readingAlberta Diary: Ric McIver Progressive Conservative leadership campaign lurches to life as Hancock Government sends mixed signals
Tory leadership candidate Ric McIver, shown on his extremely uninformative campaign website. Below: Education Minister Jeff Johnson and newly appointed Jobs, Skills, Etc. Minister Kyle Fawcett. Ho-hum. After days of virtual silence, former infrastructure minister Ric McIver made the first official appearance of his campaign for the leadership of Alberta’s
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Andrew Coyne assures us "Hudak’s bogus plan is no reason not to vote for him"
The media reaction to Hudak’s 8 fold screwup in his Million 75,000 Jobs Plan has been almost as ridiculous as the mistake in the plan itself. I already wrote about what the CBC’s frontpage was doing in the interest of “balance” and “nonpartisanship”. But what about the media op-eds? The latest
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – George Monbiot writes that contrary to the theory that wealth is a precondition to environmental standards, increased consumption tends to correlate to disregard for the our impact on the environment: For years we’ve been told that people cannot afford to care about
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Michael Hiltzik points out new research showing that business-focused policies do nothing at all to encourage any positive economic outcomes: in fact, a higher rating from ALEC for low-tax, low-regulation government correlates to less economic growth. But Kevin Drum highlights what the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Polly Toynbee writes about the continued spread of privatization based solely on corporatist dogma even in the face of obvious examples of its harm to the public: In the Royal Mail debacle, shares sold at £1.7bn rose to £2.7bn. The 16 investors
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