With the advance voting window closing on Tuesday and the Saskatchewan NDP’s convention set to take place next weekend, we’ve seen a flurry of leadership activity in the last few days – including both late appeals from the candidates themselves, and additional material for discussion. On the candidate front, Trent
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Accidental Deliberations: On divisions
Dan Tan has already provided one follow-up post on the sudden rash of commentary arising out of Erin Weir’s decision to withdraw from the Saskatchewan NDP leadership race and endorse Ryan Meili. But I’ll take my own look at how the Weir endorsement and the associated reaction from the Village
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Ian Lovett reports on the use of “capital appreciation bonds” in California to ensure that future generations pay an inflated price to private-sector developers for infrastructure today. – Justin Ling’s review of Joyce Murray’s message about electoral non-competition pacts is well worth a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Tabatha Southey rightly turns Brad Trost into a poster boy for the Harper Cons’ deliberate aversion to critical self-evaluation: We shouldn’t be too quick to judge. Let’s instead take a cue from Conservative MP Brad Trost, who, when questioned regarding the calls, said,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – The CP reports on the Canadian applicants rejected by HD Mining as it chose instead to staff its Murray River coal project solely with low-rights temporary immigrant workers: The unions, which are more broadly seeking a judicial review of Ottawa’s decision to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – The Guardian discusses how the all-too-familiar trend of growing inequality and ever more precarious lives for all but the fabulously wealthy is unsustainable: While the debate in the UK is mostly focused on growth and how best to engender it, Reich explains in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Ray Grigg explains how Idle No More and other decentralized social movements may make for a crucial counterweight to the Harper Cons and their command-and-control philosophy: Systems are always bigger and more complex than the individuals who try to control them. So political
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: #skndpldr Roundup
The most significant news from the Saskatchewan NDP leadership campaign this week was the release of another month’s worth of financial reports. And the December numbers look to reinforce rather than change the existing financial picture, with Ryan Meili posting strong gross and net numbers, Trent Wotherspoon spending enough to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading.- George Monbiot all too accurately describes the current state of politics around much of the developed world:Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to addres…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading.- Laura Ryckewaert reports that Elections Canada’s response to Robocon is now including an unprecedented level of public consultation, while Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor are digging deeper into voters’ complain…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Stephen Maher follows up on this week’s Supreme Court ruling on Etobicoke Centre by pointing out where we should be most worried about our electoral system: Fraudulent voting is far from the biggest problem facing our democracy. Disengagement is. Voting rates are declining
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Crawford Kilian talks to Ed Broadbent about the effect of increasing inequality and the prospect of changing course: On how quickly things could turn around: “I’d like to see a strategic plan. We can’t change overnight after 20 years. We could take
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Murray Mandryk and Bruce Johnstone both thoroughly slam Gerry Ritz and the Cons for their food-safety negligence. But Johnstone hints at the larger issue: Ritz, for all his faults, is not the cause of this latest debacle. He’s merely a symptom of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – The CCPA’s Christopher Schenk offers up a detailed response to the Sask Party’s attacks on workers, featuring this conclusion: In a period of widening inequality restrictive labour laws are blatantly unnecessary and regressive. Indeed, their consideration is shocking when one considers that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, taking a quick look at the early-campaign strategies of Saskatchewan’s NDP leadership candidates. For more analysis on the race…– Pat Atkinson offers her take on what the NDP needs to do while building through the leadership campaign and beyond.– Murray Mandryk focuses largely on Trent Wotherspoon’s crowd as defining
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Why now
Of all the possible answers to the suggestion of a guaranteed annual income, I for one didn’t see “how can you speak of such a thing at a time like this?” as a particularly likely one. But since it seems to be the stock response, let’s point out just how
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lori Wallach discusses the corporate coup underlying the Trans-Pacific Partnership which the Cons are so eager to force on Canada: (T)rade is the least of it. Only two of TPP’s 26 chapters actually have to do with trade. The rest is about new
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Miles Corak comments on how inequality undercuts social mobility. And Joseph Stiglitz highlights the fact that the vast majority of people hold a strong interest in not having their path to a secure and successful life blocked by a wall of upper-class money.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Evening Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Frances Russell comments on the Canada which the Harper Cons are determined to destroy. But the more important point looks to me to be less any theory of constitutionalism than the desire to have governments be as ineffective as possible at all levels:
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: A friendly reminder
Some people who should know better are suggesting that universal media condemnation (as opposed to public involvement on social media) should be seen as the main factor in getting the Cons to climb back down on arbitrary online surveillance. So let’s take a ride in the wayback machine. It wasn’t
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