Assorted content to end your week. – Alex Hemingway writes about the massive concentration of wealth among the richest few Canadians while most people have struggled through the pandemic. And Derrick O’Keefe follows up by pointing out how that accumulation highlights the need for a wealth tax, while Linda McQuaig
Continue readingTag: budget
Babel-on-the-Bay: Billions to nowhere.
It seems strange to have a provincial budget that spends close to $200 billion in the coming year and ignores the most vulnerable among us. It is a budget that will increase the provincial debt by about $33 billion and raises no taxes. You have to remember that this is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Rita Trichur writes that an attempt to boost the economy solely through monetary policy will predictably lead to even worse inequality – meaning it’s necessary for governments to instead intervene through fiscal policy to ensure that growth is shaped to be fair and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Evening Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Alex Hemingway examines how a wealth tax could raise substantially more money than assumed by the PBO. And Caterina Lindman writes about the benefits of a basic income guarantee funded by progressive taxes. – Stefan Nikola discusses how shortened work weeks are at
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Paul Krugman notes that hostility toward basic public health protection such as masks represents a stark example of conservatives sacrificing human lives to identity politics – though it’s far from the first or the last one. And James Downie writes that the Republicans
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Alex Himelfarb writes about the need to get past obsessing over deficits and taxes when they’re necessary to fund a the society we want. – Olivia Stefanovich, Karina Roman and Ryan Patrick Jones report on the Auditor General’s report placing responsibility for
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lauren Krugel reports on a push by Alberta doctors to avoid the further lifting of public health restrictions which will increase the risk of COVID-19 transmission. Sarah Zhang notes that we’re just now seeing a return to widespread recognition of the importance of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Duncan Cameron writes about the fundamental choice between austerity and full employment in developing the 2021 federal budget. And Noah Smith points out that while pipeline cancellations signal the imminent end of fossil fuels, they don’t need to have any impact on job
Continue readingScripturient: The $100 Million Mayor?
In a story on CollingwoodToday, our mayor, Brian Saunderson, shrugs off the costs of his Vindictive Judicial Inquiry (the SVJI) as being but a drop in the bucket for the town’s annual budget: He noted the town’s annual budget is nearly $100 million, and the inquiry costs amount to less
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Andrew Nikiforuk writes about the even greater urgency to get to COVID zero as more dangerous strains of the virus spread in Canada. And Adam Miller reports on growing recommendations that we wear more effective masks, including while outdoors. -Truc Nguyen reports on
Continue readingScripturient: Musings of a B-Film Junkie
I put a DVD of the 1939 film, The Gorilla, into the player and sat back to watch. Bela Lugosi (above, centre) starred beside the Ritz Brothers (trio above), a popular American comedy trio contemporary with the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, and the Marx Brothers. This would be the
Continue reading52 Ideas: Within the decade, Electrification Technology will quickly impact the Alberta Economy & Athabascan Oil Sands
If I were the Mayor of Calgary, an Alberta MLA who goes to Edmonton or a MP for a riding in Alberta, the thing that would terrify me the most is the decreasing cost and improving efficiency of Electric Vehicle (EV) battery back technology. In reading OilPrice.com – a leading
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your Boxing Day reading. – Kyle Hanniman and Trevor Tombe examine the relative fiscal positions of Canada’s federal and provincial governments – concluding that while there isn’t a need for austerity anywhere, there’s a lot more room to maneuver at the federal level than in most provinces
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Steven Lewis writes about the Sask Party government’s catastrophic refusal to act on the evidence that Saskatchewan needs to sharply curb the spread of COVID-19. Julia Peterson reports on the Saskatchewan doctors making it clear that we can’t afford to let up over
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – David MacDonald, Lindsay McLaren, Katherine Scott and Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood each examine the Libs’ fiscal update and find that headlines about progressive priorities mask the lack of much that’s specific or new. – Shamshad Ahktar, Kevin Gallagher and Ulrich Volz discuss the G20’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Umair Haque warns that we may be approaching the point where the cost of fighting man-made threats to our environment exceeds the resources we have available for the task. – Andrew Jackson highlights how the people most eager to whinge about deficits
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday #skvotes Links
While advance voting continues to shatter Saskatchewan’s previous records, there’s plenty of new information for people still making their decision. – Julia Peterson reports on Elections Saskatchewan’s warning that the tens of thousands of mail-in ballots won’t be counted until after election day – meaning that many results could remain
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday #skvotes Links
Over 40,000 voters went to the polls in the first day of advance voting. But particularly for the many people who haven’t yet cast a ballot, here’s the latest from Saskatchewan’s election campaign. – Laura Sciarpelletti reports on Elections Saskatchewan’s warning that it’s facing a shortage of poll workers –
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Patrick Brethour discusses houw the effects of the coronavirus pandemic have been anything but fairly or equally distributed. And Katherine Scott highlights how the effect has been to undo decades of already-slow progress in improving the conditions of single mothers. – Don
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – John Metta discusses how low-income workers have been barely treading water for decades even before the coronavirus collapse. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives points out how we can take the failure of EI during the pandemic as a signal that we need
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