Assorted content to end your Saturday. – Susan Delacourt’s mention of “likeonomics” as a branding strategy offers an interesting reference point for Canadian politics (particularly since our political scene has been radically reshaped by one obvious example of it in the 2011 election). But I’m not sure there’s much new
Continue readingTag: Civil service
Accidental Deliberations: A Healthy Society – Chapter 2 Discussion
Chapter 2 of Ryan Meili’s A Healthy Society discusses the place of politics as “medicine on a larger scale”. Meili looks for lessons in our political discussion based on how medical knowledge has advanced in the past few decades, and points out a new definition of success that looks to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Jared Bernstein discusses the effect of raising taxes on the highest-income households, featuring this in particular: Growth and jobs. History shows that higher taxes are compatible with economic growth and job creation: job creation and GDP growth were significantly stronger following the Clinton
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Yes, the individual examples are worrisome enough. But the real takeaway from Sarah Schmidt’s report on the CFIA’s testing of food products for sale in Canada is that more often than not, consumers can’t trust what’s on the label: CFIA allows for a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – When even free-trade warrior Barrie McKenna can only respond incredulously to a message campaign on behalf of the wealthy, you know it’s gone too far. So here’s McKenna answering the contrived outrage over the NDP’s proposal for a slight increase in income tax
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Danielle Martin discusses the importance of federal involvement in Canada’s public health care system: Whose job is it to co-ordinate health-care reform in Canada? Canadians expect our federal government to play that role. We want to know that wherever we live, we will
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – John Cassidy neatly contrasts growth in the postwar period against that in recent decades – with the former seeing a “picket fence” growth pattern where all segments of society benefited roughly equally, while the latter produces a “staircase” effect (aside from an utterly
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading… – No, we shouldn’t read too much into the first wave of polling following Thomas Mulcair’s election as NDP leader. But there are a couple of points where the early returns are far enough out of line with expectations to be worth pointing
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – The revelations just keep on coming in Robocon, to the point where the news of an offensively-named burner cellphone account used to leave fraudulent messages with Racknine has already been overtaken by more ridings and staffers being implicated – even as the Cons
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Susan Riley brilliantly slams the message that austerity is necessary for everybody but those who already have the most: Is anyone else getting tired of being lectured about austerity by wealthy consultants in expensive suits who charge $1,500 a day for their advice
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Vivian Belik looks at the long-ignored outcomes from a guaranteed income experiment in Dauphin, MB – and finds that the positive results of of providing a secure income to all citizens were well worth the investment: (T)he Mincome program was conceived as a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Helpful for now
Frances Bula offers up what should be a good-news story about a volunteer effort to track down tax rebates for homeless people: Ms. Lissimore did 300 tax returns last year and expects to do about the same or more this year. Most of those returns do little more than ensure
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Parliament in Review: November 4, 2011
Friday, November 4 saw another day of spirited question period debate on the economy. But for once, the main theme was total cooperation – even if much of the day was spent lamenting its absence. The Big Issue The main bill up for debate was the Cons’ legislation dealing with
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – The Edmonton Journal makes it clear that the Cons’ efforts to stymie any global climate change agreement aren’t without some serious controversy even in the party’s Alberta core: The year 2011 had better not go down in history as one in which Canada
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Evening Links
Assorted content for your evening reading. – While I’m less than convinced about his desire to break down party loyalties, David Thompson highlights the need for progressives to fight back against decades of corporatist dominance in both political messaging and policy development: To win over the long run, progressives will
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Friday reading.- Susan Riley points out that nothing positive figures to come from the Cons’ plans to slash Canada’s public service:No good will come of proposed public service cuts, if experience is any guide. Not a lea…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading.- Alex Himelfarb offers a warning about Canada’s current inequality trap:In a society with just a few winners and many losers, a case can be made that everybody truly loses. When he argued for higher taxes on th…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your afternoon reading.- Andrew Potter comments on Samara’s most recent findings about federal politicians in Canada:Samara’s findings underscore the profound amateurism that permeates our national politics. When the vast majorit…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading.
– Chantal Hebert offers up the definitive response to the Cons, Libs and media outlets still going out of their way to attack the NDP for winning support in Quebec:
Given the context, to retroactively portray La…