This is addressed to all those CRAP MPs who hover like wasps over rancid jam ’round the PM.. Do none of you have a backbone? Is there not a single honest and moral bone in any of your bodies, that you stand around and let this madness continue? Will none
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Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading. – It’s a few months old, but the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s comparison of U.S. states with a zero personal income tax to those with the highest tax levels looks like one of the most clear refutations yet of the idea that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Bruce Johnstone and the Star-Phoenix editorial board both join the voices decrying the Cons’ decision to throw parliamentary democracy under their omnibus budget bill. And Gerald Caplan points out the Harper Cons’ more general tendency to silence dissenting views: (T)here’s little doubt the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Evening Links
This and that to end your week. – Jeffrey Simpson discusses how the Cons have diminished Canada’s place on the world stage: For those who care about Canada’s international reputation and Canada’s ability to influence others in the pursuit of Canada’s self-interest, these are discouraging days. Everywhere, there is penny-pinching
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Cheap and dirty
Yesterday, I columnized about what seemed to be fairly unobjectionable purposes of environmental assessments: The most recent spill into the Red Deer River paired a high-volume pipeline with a pristine area where a tributary feeds into multiple sources of drinking water. And in a proper assessment process, that combination would
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Evening Links
Assorted content to end your day. – Thomas Walkom highlights why we should be nothing but dubious about the austerians’ call to slash public supports: The Harper Conservatives are scaling back spending on national parks to save about $20 million. But at the same time they are planning to spend
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – The OECD is the latest independent observer to confirm Thomas Mulcair’s point that dutch disease is a real problem for Canadian manufacturing. And Marc Lee calls for a green industrial revolution as a better path toward economic development and environmental responsibility than
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on what we should learn from the recent spate of Alberta oil spills. For further reading…– Stephen Hume finds that Alberta’s pipelines have spilled roughly 28 million litres of oil in thousands of leaks and ruptures just since 2006, and puts the results in perspective: (C)onsider the campaign by
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Michael Harris lists ten things the Harper Cons want Canadians to forget before the 2015 election. But it’s worth keeping in mind that their expectations for mind-wiping are surely shaped by their own willingness to completely forget what they were repeating incessantly before
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Plenty of commentators are rightly speaking out against the Cons’ anti-democratic omnibus bill, including Tim Harper and the Star-Phoenix and Vancouver Sun editorial boards. And even John Ivison can’t muster much more than “but the Libs did it too!” in defence of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Parliament in Review – May 9, 2012
Wednesday, May 9 saw the first Committee of the Whole discussion of the Cons’ budget bill – with the opportunity for hours of direct questions about military spending giving rise to little more than even more tedious repetition of F-35s talking points in place of responses. The Big Issue Jack
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
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 readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Erika Shaker points out how Quebec’s student protests are a natural and justified reaction to the policy choice to saddle young workers with debt: (T)he effects of student debt are not exactly “character building”. Postponement of owning a home or starting a family.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Friday reading. – Michael Harris neatly sums up the Harper Cons’ legacy: In many ways, the Harper legacy will come down to this: how much can he get away with? Incumbency furnishes a speedy getaway car. From a legislative perspective, Harper might as well be King
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Trish Hennessy assembles a handy set of ideas to deal with income inequality. – No, there isn’t much new in the Cons’ familiar pattern of deceiving the public, covering it up, then lying by about the cover-up by blaming civil servants who
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Among the other possible tests in an impending Etobicoke Centre by-election, here’s one I’ll be curious to watch: will attention to the Robocon scandal turn the Cons’ usual misleading robocall blast strategy into a liability rather than a low-cost means of injecting messages
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Lana Payne weighs in on the Cons’ goal of reducing wages for Canadian workers: As an economist, Stephen Harper must know what his government’s changes to employment insurance (EI), the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), the elimination of the Fair Wage Act
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: BlackOutSpeakOut
No new posts in this space tomorrow for the BlackOutSpeakOut protest.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Parliament in Review – May 7, 2012
Monday, May 7 saw another day largely dominated by debate on the Cons’ omnibus budget bill. The Big Issue Plenty of MPs rightly focused on the Cons’ move to combine so many disparate types of legislation into a single behemoth of a bill. Don Davies remembered his first instruction as
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading. – It’s undoubtedly an embarrassment for John Baird to have leapt at a thoroughly implausible bit of anti-UN spin. But I’d think there’s more reason for hope than concern in the long run: if a year into their majority mandate the Cons are still
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