Rules “a consequence of weakened federal environmental laws under Bill C-38″ By: Greenpeace Canada & Environmental Defence | Press Release: TORONTO, ON, Apr 5, 2013 – New undemocratic rules are creating a barrier to public participation in upcoming National Energy Board (NEB) hearings into the proposal for Enbridge’s Line 9 oil pipeline.
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Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – The Star makes the case for a serious crackdown on offshore tax avoidance: Thanks to a spectacular data leak Canadians are getting a glimpse into what some have dubbed the “black hole” of globalization: The $20 trillion or more in unreported income thought
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Michael Harris rightly points out that a steady stream of scandals and incompetence from the Cons says plenty about Stephen Harper’s own judgment (or lack thereof): Sooner or later, the country is going to realize that there is something terribly wrong with
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Joseph Stiglitz discusses how the combination of increasingly concentrated wealth and deteriorating has eliminated any pretense of equal opportunity within the U.S.: It’s not that social mobility is impossible, but that the upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity. According to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading.- Andrew Jackson takes a look at the UK’s strong movement for a living wage, and notes that it’s long past time for a similar push in Canada.- The most remarkable part of this week’s revelations about the Cons’ cu…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On grassroots input
Saskatchewan’s NDP has released a report on its labour and employment consultations. And between the 700 participants and the report’s drafters, there are plenty of noteworthy suggestions and recommendations worth discussing. Let’s start with a few of the more detailed points. On process, a couple of observations about the Sask
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Leadership 2013 Roundup
There’s a common theme to the last few days’ developments in the Saskatchewan NDP leadership race. While plenty of the campaigns are doing plenty worth talking about, they may have work to do in making sure interested members understand what’s happening. Perhaps most notably, there’s the contrast between Erin Weir’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Alice interviews Allan Gregg about his sharp criticism of anti-evidence politics, and finds some optimism on Gregg’s part that clear falsehoods will eventually be treated with due disdain: Q. So, one of your early mentors, [US pollster] Richard Wirthlin, he’s arguing that values
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Armine Yalnizyan points to the Law Commission of Ontario’s proposals to make sure that labour laws don’t stack the deck against workers, and encourages citiznes to have their own say: The truth is, most people don’t know anything about their legal rights as
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On provisional boundaries
Volkov has already summed up the likely effect of the preliminary Saskatchewan federal riding boundaries released today. But before we start planning the Regina Lewvan victory party, the most important part of the boundary revision process has yet to play out. So I’ll encourage Saskatchewan readers to sign up for
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On connections
Tuesday, July 31 was the deadline for submissions to the Wall government’s consultation process on employment and labour law. Like hundreds of other interested individuals and groups, I took the time to put together a submission – based on the underlying view that however biased the process was from the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your day. – For those wondering what might become of Nathan Cullen’s leadership campaign plan to work with progressives of all party stripes, we now have part of the answer: in advance of the Calgary Centre by-election, Cullen will be reaching out to discuss how to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: The Saskatchewan Way
It’s certainly a plus to see a new site encouraging Saskatchewan citizens to speak out against the Saskatchewan Party’s planned attacks on workers. But while Brad Wall’s party obviously has its own reasons for limiting any discussion to the issues it’s chosen, there’s no reason for anybody making an outside
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – I’ll very much hope Chantal Hebert is wrong in her conclusion that Canadians are getting ever more doubtful as to whether change is possible through the ballot box. But one can’t much argue with her take on why that perception might be
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: A Healthy Society – Chapter 8 Discussion
In chapter 8 of A Healthy Society, Ryan Meili discusses how to improve our democratic system, distinguishing between the participatory action research model which is helping to drive development work in Mozambique and the top-down structures and cynical views of the political system that have all too often been the
Continue readingEnvironmental Law Alert Blog: “Directly affected” silences hunters, fishers, landowners … and environmentalists
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver, recently stated that proposed changes to Canada’s environmental laws will (if passed) prevent anyone who is not “directly affected” from speaking at environmental reviews. But public participation has always been central to environmental assessment. "Directly affected" is a narrow legal test
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On common concerns
Most of the discussion of Samara’s report on political disengagement has focused on the responses of non-voters. But perhaps more interesting is the fact that the disengaged and the currently-engaged seem to have virtually identical critiques of how our political system fails to function: “Almost without fail, the disengaged we
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading.- Erin compares the numbers behind the NDP and Sask Party platforms, with the one major difference being the windfall potash profits the Wall government wants to keep out of public hands.- Bruce Johnstone highlight…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Leading by example
David Atkins points out how the Tea Party (however contrived and astroturfed) may have contributed to the rise of the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement by legitimizing protest as a means of political change. And it’s worth highlighting that Canada…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how B.C.’s HST referendum and Wisconsin’s state Senate recalls should rekindle our interest in setting up direct democratic mechanisms to hold governments accountable between elections.
No followup links for now since both have been amply cov…
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