This and that for your weekend reading. – Mark Leiren-Young shares Corky Evans’ perceptive take on how the B.C. NDP has lost its way – and the message is one which we should apply elsewhere as well: I remember when one of the Leaders I worked for asked some guys
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Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Marc Lee takes a high-level look at the absurdity of our destructive economic choices: Exhibit one: the North Pole at the moment is a one-foot-deep aquamarine lake. After reaching record low ice cover and thickness at the end of summer 2012, an ice-free
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading. – Daniel Boffey catches one of David Cameron’s top aides saying what most Cons leave as an unstated assumption: that recession and depressed wages are good for business (as long as “business” is defined only to mean short-term profits based on exploitation): The prime
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
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
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Arthur Haberman argues that our universal public health care system helps contribute to a more democratic society: There is something that political philosophers — those like Tocqueville and Mill in the 19th century — have come to call living democratically. By this it
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, building off of my previous analysis on the current positioning of Canada’s federal parties. For further reading, see:– Bob Hepburn and Carol Goar on the purpose and effect of attack ads in general; and– Andrew Coyne on the Cons’ particular brand of personal attack, featuring some suggestions to reduce
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Pondering The Dark Arts
For those as weary of political attack ads as I am, The Star’s Carol Goar has an interesting column in today’s edition. Entitled Debating ‘dark arts’ of political campaigning, Goar relates her experience of moderating a panel over the weekend comprised of … Jaime Watt, the primary architect of former
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Peter Gillespie discusses the problems with tax cheats (and the overseas tax havens which encourage them): Multinational corporations and banking and financial institutions routinely use tax havens to lower or eliminate their tax obligations, avoid regulation, and shield themselves from liability. Tax havens
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Evening Links
Assorted content to end your day. – Carol Goar discusses how the Cons’ latest attacks on Employment Insurance add just one burden to the backs of workers who have already borne the brunt of decades of corporatist policy: (L)ast Sunday, employment insurance benefits in two-thirds of the country were quietly
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Friday reading. – Jennifer Ditchburn reports that the Harper Cons are making ample progress in their goal of removing Canada from any list of socially-developed welfare states, as Canada has dropped from being the world’s leader in the UN’s Human Development Index to a position outside
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Carol Goar discusses Canada’s broken fiscal stabilizers – as unemployment insurance and social programs intended to assure citizens of at least a reasonable standard of living have been cut to well below that level: Canada’s economic shock absorbers are badly worn. Employment insurance,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Erika Shaker rightly tears into the special brand of FAIPOF demanding that First Nations protesters focus solely on their own community leaders rather than recognizing broader and more systematic inequality: Much is being made of Chief Spence’s Escalade (although I’m unsure if she
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jim Stanford is the latest to point out that the Cons see accountability and transparency solely as punishments to be inflicted on their perceived enemies, not as values to be applied to their own decision-making: Following Mr. Hiebert’s logic, any organization in society
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Mike McBane and Stuart Trew note that Canada can’t afford to sign on to yet another massive giveaway to big pharma: An Ipsos Reid poll commissioned by the Council and the health coalition and released last week shows that what would normally be
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: We Have A Responsibility
As we go about our daily lives, the majority of us, I suspect, share a hierarchy of concerns ranging in priority from the health and well-being of our loved ones, to ourselves, and to our fellow humans. It is probably the latter than many of us pay only lip service
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Jessica Bruno reports on Tom Mulcair’s first six months as leader of the NDP. But while it’s certainly a plus for pundits to recognize the NDP as a viable government in waiting, perhaps the most significant development is Mulcair’s ability to persuade Canadians
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Tobi Cohen picks up on the possibility of a provincial NDP in Quebec, and notes that the federal party is considering what can be done before the next election after that set for September: NDP national director Chantale Vallerand told Postmedia News talks
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – While a misleading “wealth equals health” headline seems to have been the main take-away from the CMA’s health polling, Iglika Ivanova frames the issue more accurately in pointing out that the non-wealth determinants of health are the areas where Canada has far
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Carol Goar comments on the CEP/CAW plan to merge and work toward a far more active type of unionism: Both the CAW and the CEP — of which I am a member — gobbled up smaller unions to reach their current size.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne tears into the Cons for being interested solely in developing a junk labour market where both work safety and income security are sorely lacking. And Chris Selley offers his own rebuttal to the “no such thing as a bad job” mentality:
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