Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – John Moore questions the much-hyped assertions of a permanent Republican Conservative majority by pointing out that Canadian values haven’t changed at all even as the Harper Cons have tried to use public money to change the channel. And Justin Ling sees the Cons
Continue readingTag: Thomas Walkom
Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Friday reading. – Michael Moss writes about the amount of time and money spent by corporate conglomerates to push consumers toward eating unhealthy food: The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On policy choices
Thomas Walkom and the Mound of Sound both note that a leadership race has only signalled how far the federal Libs are from being a progressive party. But with Walkom and Paul Adams also questioning whether Canada’s political system has seen either a convergence in the middle or a drift
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Assorted content to start your week. – Dennis Gruending writes about the importance of Edgar Schmidt’s whistleblowing against unconstitutional legislation: Schmidt says that he has over a period of years raised concerns about what he considers the department’s flawed practices. He has done that through various official channels, up to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
This and that to end your week. – Bruce Campbell argues that Alberta should take a lesson from Norway on how to manage natural resources – and plenty of other provinces could stand to take notes as well: The Norwegian government owns 80 per cent of petroleum production, and retains
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Daniel Wilson discusses how Stephen Harper’s antipathy toward First Nations is making a failure of his time in office: On the global stage, he stood almost alone in opposition to 144 other countries in voting against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Thomas Walkom discusses the meaning of the Ontario Libs’ attempt to take collective bargaining rights away from teachers in the context of the wider labour movement: The union movement is one of the last remnants of the great postwar pact between labour,
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Unions After Bill C-377
In my favorite Shakespearian play, Hamlet, there is a scene wherein his erstwhile friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, explain that an acting company that used to enjoy great popularity has fallen on hard times. Thanks to a new craze in which troupes of child actors have become the rage, and “are
Continue readingAlberta Diary: Bill C-377 can be just the start – let’s shine a light on some corners that are really in the dark!
The ideal Canadian workforce, Harper Conservative style. Below: Social conservative B.C. MP Russ Hiebert. Well, you can’t fight a call for transparency, so why bother? I say, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em! The so-called Conservative Party of Stephen Harper quietly whipped its troops in the privacy of their
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Thomas Walkom’s Perspective on Teacher Unrest
On this blog I have written periodically about unions in both a favourable and a critical light. I have argued both for their necessity to mitigate the depredations that employers are sometimes given to, and I have pilloried them when cronyism or ma…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week.- Thomas Walkom discusses what the Cons’ attack on unions through bill C-377 is ultimately designed to do:Finance department figures show that the tax exemption for union and professional dues does indeed cost the fed…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading.- Yves Engler thoroughly discusses how the Harper Cons’ foreign policy has included bullying countries around the world into placing the profits Canadian mining interests over the needs of their own citizens – …
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading.- Diana Carney discusses the public’s growing recognition of inequality in Canada:I see three root causes of our concern with inequality in Canada (three seems to be the magic number). First, there is a general l…
Continue readingAlberta Diary: Expense account outrages? Only in government, you say? Puleeze!
Executives of Covenant Health enjoy a bottle of 2001 Il Piggione over lunch at Edmonton’s Characters Restaurant. Catholic health care executives may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Liberalbertaliberal Leader Raj Sherman. Alberta’s health care gong show continued to wheeze along yesterday with another revelation by the CBC that a couple of senior execs at …
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading.- Bill Curry reports on the Cons’ latest public-sector slashing. But there hasn’t yet been much discussion of the most alarming number: upwards of 30% of the Cons’ cuts are coming from the Canada Revenue Agency…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.- Duncan Cameron highlights the choice between austerity and prosperity facing the governments of both Canada and the U.S.:The economic realities faced by working people in both Canada and the United St…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Tim Harper slams the Cons for yet another omnibus abuse of parliamentary democracy: Stephen Harper didn’t invent prorogation and omnibus legislation, but he has made two arcane polysyllabic political terms part of our everyday lexicon, improving our vocabulary but diminishing our democracy. His
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Annie Lowrey reports on the evidence showing that the perpetually-increasing inequality pitched by the right as an economic plan actually serves to damage economic development: The yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots — and the political questions that gap has
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading. – Thomas Walkom comments on the Cons’ preference for low-wage, no-rights immigrant labour as a means of avoiding good jobs for Canadians: Theoretically, temporary work visas are supposed to be reserved for those with unique skills. But increasingly, the notion of skill has been
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Thomas Walkom: Harper’s Strategy Behind The Foreign Workers Program
Yesterday, over at Northern Reflections, Owen Gray wrote a post entitled A Lost Generation, a reflection on the discouraging prospects our young people face in establishing themselves in gainful employment, and the fact that their plight does not seem to be a factor in the Harper regime’s decision-making. I left
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