Assorted content for a sunny Sunday. – Paul Wells offers some theories as to why the Cons haven’t yet launched attack ads against Thomas Mulcair. But I’d think the more important aberration is the fact that they did do so against Bob Rae before he ever became the Libs’ permanent
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Accidental 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: 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: 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 Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Michael Harris rightly tears into the Cons for turning our federal government into Versailles on the Ottawa: The Harper government has more than a touch of Queen Nancy. It has already morphed into Versailles on the Ottawa. The facts, and the rules, are being
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This and that for your Thursday reading. – Duncan Cameron discusses how the Cons have already taken Canada and the world in exactly the wrong direction. But Murray Dobbin points out that we should be working on how to change things for the better once they’re finally removed from office,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Parliament in Review – April 24, 2012
Tuesday, April 24 saw a day of debate focused on a relatively non-contentious piece of legislation: a citizen’s arrest bill which largely reflected Olivia Chow’s work after charges were laid against David Chen of the Lucky Moose. The Big Issue When it came to the substance of the bill, there
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne tears into the Cons for being interested solely in developing a junk labour market where both work safety and income security are sorely lacking. And Chris Selley offers his own rebuttal to the “no such thing as a bad job” mentality:
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your day. – Kayle Hatt’s blog looks to be a must-read from here on in. And his post on what to draw from the latest polls is particularly worth a read: Every poll that has been released since Thomas Mulcair was elected leader of the NDP
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: Parliament in Review – April 5, 2012
Thursday, April 5 was the final sitting day in the House of Commons before a two-week Easter break. And the debate was much less sharp than in previous days, as the primary bill up for discussion was supported by all parties. The Big Issue That bill was S-4, a bill
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Jim Stanford neatly sums up how the Cons’ obsession with selling off both natural resources and natural resource producers affects other industries: There is no doubting the statistical correlation between oil prices and the loonie. Econometric analysis indicates that since the turn of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Erin points out that there’s a relatively simple cure for Dutch disease – just as long as provincial governments are willing to put citizens ahead of resource extractors: (S)ince resources are priced in American dollars, the higher exchange rate further reduces provincial resource
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Parliament in Review – April 3, 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012 saw the final day of debate at second reading of the Cons’ budget – and once again featured plenty of work by Peter Julian to introduce the types of perspectives the Cons would never tolerate if they could avoid it. The Big Issue Once again, Julian
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – The Cons’ move to suppress Canadian wages by encouraging the use of disposable, temporary foreign labour is receiving plenty of due outcry. Here’s Armine Yalnizyan: Disturbingly, the federal announcement also set out new wage rules that permit employers to pay temporary foreign
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Michael Harris sums up the first year of a Harper majority by pointing out the overwhelming need for change from the government we’re stuck with now: The curtain has been well and truly whipped away from the PM’s self-promoting deceptions and he is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Andrew Coyne is rightly alarmed at the Cons’ move to short-circuit any debate about major policy changes through an omnibus budget bill. And Bea Vongdoaungchanh reports that the biggest of those changes is to set our environmental laws back by half a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your weekend. – For much of the relatively recent past, one of the areas of relative consensus in economic theory is that productivity increases would find their way to workers. But Paul Krugman shows that hope to be utterly misplaced: Where did the productivity go? The
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Paul Krugman writes a long-overdue obituary for the confidence fairy who was supposed to turn needless austerity into growth contrary to all economic evidence: So, about that doctrine: appeals to the wonders of confidence are something Herbert Hoover would have found completely familiar
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Yes, the individual examples are worrisome enough. But the real takeaway from Sarah Schmidt’s report on the CFIA’s testing of food products for sale in Canada is that more often than not, consumers can’t trust what’s on the label: CFIA allows for a
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