All this talk of Senator Beth Marshall and her hefty annual stipend for chairing a committee that has met once in two years brings to mind the good senator’s role in the House of Assembly patronage scam, a.k.a. the spending scandal. Marshall is credited with first sniffing something was amiss
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Accidental Deliberations: On corrupted institutions
Plenty of others have had loads to say about the scandal surrounding Stephen Harper, Nigel Wright, Mike Duffy and the Senate generally – with Wright’s resignation today serving as just the latest chapter of a story with plenty left to be told. But I’ll add a couple of notes to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Paul Krugman draws a much-needed connection between austerity politics and Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: What Smith didn’t note, somewhat surprisingly, is that his argument is very close to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, with its argument that elites systematically exploit disasters to push through
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Duncan Cameron is the latest to weigh in on the Cons’ distorted sense of priorities in directing public research money toward private profits: Publicly available research is important. Since no one knows where discoveries or advances in knowledge will lead, the entire
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Thomas Walkom offers an insider’s look at outsourcing: Arlene says any outsourcing scheme begins with the institution’s senior management. Usually, she says, the aim is to transfer about 60 per cent of the affected jobs — often in back-shop areas like information technology
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jason Fekete reports on the growing recognition that tax evasion and avoidance are serious global problems – and the Cons’ attempt to be seen nodding at the issues. Needless to say, that posturing would be far more plausible if the same Cons weren’t
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how the current controversy over residency requirements only helps to show how Canada’s Senate is beyond fixing. For further reading…– Again, Andrew Coyne similarly points out how abolition is a more viable option than trying to rewrite rules to preserve the existing Senate.– Kelly McParland’s take on Mike
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your Family Day. – Gerald Caplan comments that it’s long past time to put the Senate out of its misery: Who knew that when well-known Canadians in 2011 begged old acquaintances now turned Conservative Senators to back a bill for cheap generic AIDS drugs for Africa,
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: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday morning reading. – Sixth Estate is the latest to weigh in on Statistics Canada’s findings about inequality: Progressive taxes are based on the idea that the more money you earn, the more you spend on unnecessary luxuries. Poor people therefore have very low tax rates
Continue readingImpolitical: Last week in Tory patronage
Catching up here! It’s hard to keep up with these porkers after all! Let’s see…“Natural Resources Ministers Announce Appointments to the Canada–Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.” You know, I would like to think that appointments to such a board would bring competent, independent judgment with some experience in the
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: Verbiage Growth Strategy #nlpoli
Right on cue in the controversy over the population growth “strategy”, a provincial cabinet minister issued a news release late on Monday and assured us that everything will be all right. There is lots of bureaucratic jargon, like the trendy use of the word “inform”: The Provincial Government has developed
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: High-Value Delivery #nlpoli
Two cabinet ministers trekked up the Southern Shore on Wednesday to hand over a cheque for some government cash to a local group of seniors. Of course, they dragged their political staff with them. The value of the cheque was $2,000.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week.- Rick Salutin offers an important take on the U.S. election by pointing out that the Occupy movement and its focus on inequality laid the groundwork for Barack Obama’s re-election:The aftermath to the bailouts was the…
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: Kathy Dunderdale, give-aways, and the resource curse #nlpoli
Ontario has been interested in Gull Island since at least the 1990s. We didn’t need Kathy Dunderdale to say that again as part of the advertising show she is mounting before finally admitting Muskrat Falls is a done deal. As recently as 2005, Dunderdale and her friends turned up their
Continue readingImpolitical: Benchquest: The what to do with Vic Toews saga rolls on
Just reading Tim Harper’s latest, hot off the internets: “Vic Toews and his quest for the bench.” This part jumped out: The Court of Appeal post is a federal appointment and Harper is believed to have told Toews that he would not appoint his minister directly to the bench. Instead,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Andrew Jackson thoroughly demolishes the argument that after three decades of wage stagnation and soaring corporate profits, Canada’s economy somehow needs to see workers suffer even more: The reality is that the pay of most workers has stagnated in real terms over the
Continue readingImpolitical: Something stinks on the Oshawa waterfront: Let’s ask Flaherty
Jim Flaherty is Minister Responsible for the GTA. Also happens to be the MP for Oshawa-Whitby. His wife, Christine Elliott is the MPP for Whitby-Oshawa. And there were big goings on in Oshawa yesterday where an ethanol plant was approved of by the federal port authority over significant local objections:
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Rick Salutin discusses the link between parity of wealth and democratic participation, while pointing out why there’s reason for people to engage much more in the latter (W)hy didn’t the majority ever vote to expropriate the rich and take all their stuff? Perhaps
Continue readingCanadian Progressive World: Mexicans Protest Enrique Pena Nieto’s Stolen Presidency
An estimated 30 000 demonstrators marched through Mexico City on Sunday accusing President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), of massive electoral fraud. The protesters carried placards with messages such as: “Fraud, Fraud”, “Winning by cheating is not winning at all and is illegal”, “You launder money, we
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