This and that for your Sunday reading. – Vanmala Subramaniam reports on the move by real estate developers to push tenants out of desperately-needed housing in Canada’s largest cities to chase after short-term profits. – David Wallace Wells asks how the rapidly-materializing worst-case climate change scenarios are being met with
Continue readingTag: renewable energy
Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. -The UK’s Association of Directors of Public Health speaks out (PDF) about the importance of giving children the best possible start in life – including through security in the essentials of life. – But Christina Gibson-Davis and Christine Perchenski write about the increased inequality
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Michal Kalecki discusses how full employment shifts the balance of power from corporations to workers. Roland Kupers reminds us that inequality is a matter of policy choices – and that there’s broad public support to reduce the level we’re stuck with at
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on Regina’s longstanding rail-freeway conflict as an example of the need to take the long view of infrastructure decisions – and the dangers of locking ourselves into dying and dirty industries with the choices we make on pipelines. For further reading…– CBC reported on the City of Regina’s feasibility
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne rightly criticizes the World Bank for trying to push discredited and inhumane trickle-down economics as a substitute for viable economic development. – Gary Younge calls for some much-needed recognition of the toxic masculinity behind so many mass killings. And Nora Loreto
Continue readingAlberta Politics: If there was ever a time for the U of A to stick to its guns and welcome David Suzuki to Edmonton, this is it!
The University of Alberta’s dean of engineering believes his faculty faces “the worst crisis, a crisis of trust, that we’ve faced in more than three decades.” The immediate cause of this perceived looming disaster for the U of A’s most favoured faculty? “The conferral of a single honorary degree,” wrote
Continue readingAlberta Politics: New Kinder Morgan exit strategy hint emerges as tangled Trans Mountain tale twists the national knickers
Jason Kenney, leader of Alberta’s Conservative Opposition party, must’ve struggled yesterday to keep a smirk off his face as he bloviated piously about Kinder Morgan Inc. President Steven Kean’s rumination the time may be nigh to pull the plug on the controversial Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project that has the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Paul Krugman writes that a transition to a clean energy economy is well within reach – as long as politicians don’t put the interests of oil money over our economic and environmental future. But Gordon Laxer notes that NAFTA already limits Canada’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Tom Parkin discusses the Libs’ identity politics – and how they endanger people’s substantive interests both in what the Libs fail to do, and in the predictable reaction from right-wing populists: For Liberals, identity politics is a distraction from economic policies that are
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Evening Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Andre Picard writes about the unjustifiable limitations and inconsistencies in Canada’s health care system: Break your leg and the X-ray and cast will be covered, but you will need to pay for the crutches. Break your jaw and it will be wired at
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lee Drutman points out that Donald Trump’s presidency represents an entirely foreseeable result of a two-party, first-past-the-post electoral system: (C)ontrary to claims that American political parties have to appeal broadly to win, they only need to win a quarter of the voting-age population
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how the Boundary Dam carbon capture and storage project – cited incessantly by Scott Moe and the Saskatchewan Party as a substitute for a climate change action plan – has in fact proven a costly failure both as a power source and a means of reducing greenhouse gas
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Rochelle Toplensky reports that ten years after a financial meltdown based on the instability of top-down economic structures, multinational corporations are paying substantially lower effective tax rates than they did before. And Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappaport follow up on how the Trump
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Andrew Sheng discusses the role of oversimplified assumptions about economic development in exacerbating wealth and income inequality: The American era has been very comfortable with the timeless, universal model of the free market. Inconvenient problems such as inequality are market failures, which the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Julian Cribb reports on new research as to mass exposure to chemicals and pollutants: Almost every human being is now contaminated in a worldwide flood of industrial chemicals and pollutants – most of which have never been tested for safety – a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Brent Patterson rightly worries about the prospect that Justin Trudeau will choose to emulate Donald Trump’s anti-social agenda (just as he’s too often done with Stephen Harper’s): At the time of last year’s federal budget, Finance Minister Bill Morneau commented he would
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Joan Hennessy writes that instead of limiting ourselves to holiday-season charity, we should insist on fair wages and dignity for our fellow citizens throughout the year: ll the while, the economy has been on the mend and corporate earnings have risen, but the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Marco Chown Oved, Toby Heaps and Michael Yow discuss the long-term transition away from meaningful corporate tax contributions to Canada’s public purse: For every dollar corporations pay to the Canadian government in income tax, people pay $3.50. The proportion of the public budget
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Doug Henwood interviews Brooke Harrington about the role of offshoring in hiding and concentrating wealth: (W)hat does it say about the state of capitalism that these immense fortunes are sequestered; not so much engaged with expansion of the system but are being kept
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Note To Justin And Rachel
Please explain again why your insistence that we need to build more pipelines is valid, given these facts: A new world record price for electricity set earlier this month signals a radical disruption in global energy markets — and Canada, whose economy was once powered by some of the world’s
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