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With each story that I read about her, my respect for Elizabeth Warren grows. Would that Canada had someone similar to inspire us.

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The Harper Cons are trying to spin their loss in Labrador as negative for Trudeau. How pathetic is that?
Mia Rabson writes: The Conservatives who are trying to spin that this is no big deal because well, majority governments don't often win byelections and well, the Liberals didn't win it by as much as one poll said they would a few weeks ago so really Trudeau messed things up and this is a sign he is in over his head, is just nonsense and kind of smacks of sore losership.

I realize that books have to be flogged, but lately these people, Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon, have been all over Canadian media with a 'new' take on fetus fetishist strategy.

Actually, it ain't new at all, but hey, those women's studies MAs (pdf) don't write themselves, you know.

The thesis is that the anti-choice movement in Canada is getting 'sophisticated', co-opting pro-choice language, framing abortion as 'harming women', moving the *undebate* into a discussion of free speech and democracy, claiming that it's a 'youth movement', and playing the 'silenced' victim card.

The anti-abortion movement in Canada, while increasingly enlivened and sophisticated, remains a small minority. Clearly phrased polls show that Canadians do not want the issue re-politicized. This is precisely why Harper promised not to do so. He knows that it is a toxic issue for his goal of mainstreaming conservatism. The anti-abortion movement has also understood that the old arguments and positioning have not worked. They are therefore increasingly seeking to frame the issue in ways that piggyback on values, issues and rhetorical strategies traditionally used by progressive movements (and which have greater traction and resonance in Canadian society).
Veteran fetus fetishist watchers (ahem) recognize all these tactics. They've been trying them forever.

The 'abortion harms women (AHW)' meme originated over a decade ago with the 'Moses' of the 'post-abortion movement', quack David Reardon. They try, amusingly, to back this up with sciencey stuff that we here at DJ! love to debunk. That abortion causes breast cancer, insanity, substance abuse, etc etc.

Warawa's Wank, aka #M408, is a variant on AHW with the new twist that abortion harms 'preborn' women.

Co-opting language, been there, done that.



Free speech, democracy, and human rights? Yep. Comparisons of abortion to slavery, genocide, and the Holocaust abound.

Youth movement? Sure, especially since they're now admitting that Catholic schools pay to bus kids to events like March for Lies.

Hilariously, they've been trying to 'hip'-ify their activities for years too.

Martyrdom has always been big with them, recently celebrated with
Jubilee medals courtesy of the Canadian government.

Silencing? Old hat.




In trying to work up a new take on a dying movement, these new kids on the block give the fetus fetishists waaaay too much credit. It's the sameold sameold, no matter how many books they have to sell hard they try to spin it.

It is a small change for Harper. But how is taxpayers' money being spent? Maybe Harper built another fake-lake. This time for himself.

He's back.  Donald Rumsfeld has written a leadership guide entitled Rumsfeld's Rules that is being released today.  Wired has a review.

Who better to impart life lessons than the only defense secretary in U.S. history to screw up two wars at once? True to confident form, that’s what Donald Rumsfeld attempts in his new book on leadership, Rumsfeld’s Rules. He actually has good advice — so much that you really wish he would have taken some of it at the Pentagon. 

“If you expect people to be in on the landing, include them in the takeoff” is good advice. “When negotiating, never feel that you are the one who must fill every silence” is great advice. “We cannot ensure success, but we can deserve it” isn’t exactly advice, but it’s the kind of thing that gets you fired up to ace that meeting or take that hill, which is probably why George Washington said it in the first place.

But then there’s the onslaught of irony that comes from any advice book written by a man whose name has become synonymous in defense circles with Epic Fail. “Those who think that they know, but are mistaken, and act upon their mistakes, are the most dangerous people to have in charge” is a pull quote in Rumsfeld’s Rules attributed to Margaret Thatcher. It’s also a serviceable epitaph for Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon during a time when the Bush administration elected to invade Iraq based on (to be charitable) mistaken premises, diverting resources from the war against al-Qaida, ignoring an incubating insurgency in Afghanistan, and ultimately mismanaging all three efforts.

When dealing with the press, Rumsfeld cautions, never put out misleading information. “During the Bush administration, we took care that the information we put out was accurate,” except apparently if it was about Saddam Hussein allying with al-Qaida or coming on the verge of a nuclear bomb or possessing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

I don't see myself buying Rummy's Rules any time soon.  If, however, you do, please pass along some more of his bon mots.

It turns out that the Chinese Communist leadership and the Canadian Conservative leadership believe in a lot of the same stuff.

They both want economic liberalism but political conformity and suppression of dissent.

China's leadership has now sent out a notice to crack down on the introduction and spread of dangerous Western values.

The Chinese government has confronted demands for democratic reform from activists emboldened by Mr Xi's vows to respect the law. In recent days, some activists have cited rumours that the party issued a warning against seven ideas that are considered anathema, including media freedom and judicial independence. But the official summaries did not include such language.

Officials must "fully understand the dangers posed by views and theories advocated by the West," said the account from Chongqing, which said they must "cut off at the source channels for disseminating erroneous currents of thought".

"Strengthen management of the internet, enhance guidance of opinion, purify the environment on the internet, give no opportunities that lawless elements can seize on," it said.
Reports on other local party committee websites in north-east and south-west China also described the directive, although in less detail.

The demands for ideological conformity show that Mr Xi and other leaders want to inoculate the public from any expectations of major political liberalisation, even as they explore loosening some state controls over the economy, several analysts said.
 Do you think we don't have elements of these same pursuits within our government?  Both governments seek to advance ideological conformity.  That's the whole purpose behind Harper's secrecy and information control.  It is precisely why he has severed communications between the public and their public and armed services.  It is why he has transformed all branches of the government into his partisan political agencies.  It is why the Harper government hides in silence.
Harper's instincts are to control the internet, to curb media freedom and to undermine judicial independence.  Perhaps if he had his way, Harper would prefer to preside over Beijing on the Rideau.

There doesn't seem to be a day that passes anymore that doesn't bring some but today we have two outrages to pass along courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald.

First up is the mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto.   Hashi, in a moment of splendid Japanese cultural sensitivity, chose to deliver his views on the "comfort women" who were kidnapped by the Japanese army and forced to work in brothels serving Japanese soldiers.


Mr Hashimoto told reporters in Osaka on Monday that the comfort women served a useful purpose. "When soldiers are risking their lives by running through storms of bullets, and you want to give these emotionally charged soldiers a rest somewhere, it's clear that you need a comfort women system."

Mr Hashimoto is the co-leader of the Japan Restoration Association, a populist party with 57 lawmakers in Parliament. His comments follow those of a string of Japanese politicians who have recently challenged what they say is a distorted view of Japan's wartime history. Last month, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seemed to question whether Japan was the aggressor during the war, saying that the definition of "invasion" was relative.

Now let's travel across the Pacific Ocean to the Central American tropical paradise of Belize.   A construction company there used backhoes and bulldozers to destroy one of the country's largest Mayan pyramids.  They wanted the stone for road construction.

Photos from the scene showed backhoes clawing away at the pyramid's sloping sides, leaving an isolated core of limestone cobbles at the centre, with what appears to be a narrow Mayan chamber dangling above one clawed-out section.


"To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building. Why can't these people just go and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It's mind-boggling."

Okay, that's it.   You can go shake your head now.
 

Harry Leslie Smith says he's too old to fight those who today would wreck the civilization he and so many others fought and in too many cases died to protect.  In his closing years Harry sees his civilization again imperiled only, this time, not from some distant fascist monster but from within.

Across the world death moved, for too many years in lock step with both the season for sowing and for reaping. We were a world at war, and for those of us in Britain the cost was enormous in lost and ruined lives. But it didn't matter because we believed that the cause was just and that, whether we came from humble or refined stock, we were all in this war together. It was that common and shared faith in ourselves and in the notion that everyone's contribution, large or small, was important to the war effort that saw us through those dark hours. It was what kept us buggering on  until our fortunes turned and the war against Nazi Germany reached its bloody end in the spring of 1945.

...I was sure of one thing: I was a lucky man. I had what was called back then a good war and I was not disappointed by my survival. I had done my bit and I never shirked my paymaster's orders, but I was one of the fortunate few; death had eluded me while I served in the RAF.

I felt blessed by luck because so many others – friends, neighbours, acquaintances and complete strangers – had not been so lucky. They were never going to see twenty-five or be able to put down roots and raise a family and enjoy the fruits of peace. I knew like the rest of my compatriots knew, the dead had reluctantly sacrificed their existence to preserve civilisation for the living.

...It has been almost 70 years since the guns of the second world war fell silent and I am no longer sure if the dead would agree that their lives were worth the price of today's society.

To me, this brave new world feels all wrong, out of tune with what the men and women of World War Two accomplished with our "blood, sweat and tears". It just seems too flippant, too easy, too profane in this present world; for our politicians, our media pundits, and our industrial military complex to intone the beaches of D-Day, Sword, Juno, Gold and Omaha as if it were the catechism for freedom, when our individual and collective liberty is more at risk now than it has ever been since the end of Nazism.

My own father, one of Harry's happy warriors, came to speak similar thoughts toward the end of his life.   Thoughts that had never truly taken hold of his consciousness until he embarked on the years of reflection that sometimes come to us, if we're lucky, as we near the end of life.  It's a powerful mix of a sense of betrayal and failure.

Today, however, in a world where our reservoirs of wealth are as deep and enormous as all the mighty rivers of the world combined, our politicians, financial institutions and megalithic industries tell us we can no longer afford these human rights that men sacrificed their lives for: the freedom to live with dignity in a compassionate society. We are told by those in charge that we can no longer live with luxuries like healthcare, proper state funded pensions, decent wages, trade unions and most aspects of our social safety network.

 The problem with society, today, is not lack of money or debt but lack of ideas, lack of commitment by our government to realise that its constituents are the people, not city bankers and hedge fund managers whose loyalty is to their ledger books rather than to the community. I don't know if we will come out of this present darkness. Perhaps humanity will simply retreat into the caves whence our ancestors came because we were cowed by self-serving political parties and dubious leaders of business. I hope not, for the sake of the generations to come, but there is one thing I am certain of: had the politicians and business mandarins of today been in power in 1939, they wouldn't have had the bottle to fight Nazism. There would have been no Dunkirk, no Battle of Britain, no Finest Hour. Our leaders today on either side of the house would have allowed the lights across Europe to grow dim, because after all that would have been the cheapest and most prudent solution to Hitler's tyranny.

We owe a lot to Harry and all the others of his kind but there's only one way to make good our debt.   That is to keep this message alive and act on it in very tangible ways, even if that means accepting some risk and uncertainty, for they showed us that you have to be willing to accept great risks and sacrifice if you're to have any chance of prevailing.

The Saskatchewan Water Security Agency recorded this amazing video of a massive ice surge along the Saskatchewan River.

An eye-opener in today's Guardian reveals that, before she jettisoned the Alaska governor's office to join John McCain's presidential campaign, Sarah Palin was actively involved on the climate change front.

In September 2007, a rising star of Alaskan politics dared to take on one of the toughest, most challenging issues for any leader: climate change. That summer, seasonal ice cover had fallen to its lowest extent since satellite records began in 1979, leaving much of the Arctic as open water. A few months earlier, Al Gore had won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth. 

It seemed as if the timing was right to deal with climate change, and so the politician approached a group of high-level officials to develop a climate change strategy for Alaska.

Their leader was Sarah Palin, the then governor of Alaska before her entry into national Republican party politics. "Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is also a social, cultural, and economic issue important to all Alaskans," said Palin, announcing two new working groups on climate change.

"As a result of this warming, coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice, record forest fires, and other changes are affecting, and will continue to affect, the lifestyles and livelihoods of Alaskans," she went on.

The focus on climate was temporary. Once Palin joined the Republican ticket as running mate to John McCain in the 2008 presidential elections, Palin dismissed climate science as "snake oil". 

Sarah Palin was obviously a moral contortionist whose flexibility allowed her to shake the bonds of integrity at will.  It's an enormously valuable skill for opportunists questing for power and don't we have a few of those in our own country?  It seems there's a bit of the Sarah Palin syndrome in our own pols.  Harper is full to the brim with it but it's not hard to detect traces of it in Mulcair and Trudeau also.

In today's political world where policy platforms are treated like military secrets to be concealed from an untrustworthy electorate this sort of moral flexibility is not only helpful but almost essential.  It is the undercarriage of political opportunism, the means of steering in this direction or that in pursuit of  extra votes here or there or over there.

When a contest becomes a race among opportunists, what choice does the public really have, what hope?  We're watching a spectacle of political musical chairs today only there's only one chair and it's smack dab in the centre and they all want their arse on  it.   These are the perfect conditions for moral ambiguity and opportunism.  There can only be one winner but everyone else, the public included, stands to lose.

Political opportunism is not political leadership and rarely will any lasting good come of it.

When I read about the Bangladesh garment factory tragedy it breaks my heart. Over 1000 workers dead and many are missing. Cheap clothing in the U.S but at what cost.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Canadians want a vision for the future. Canadians know we're not going in the right direction. A lot of Canadians are dismayed at the calamity that has befallen our democracy and the mean-spirited authoritarianism and the divide and conquer politics that have become the benchmark of our federal government.

Give them hope and you will reconnect with those disaffected, disengaged voters. Give them something to believe in, something to aspire to and you won't have to wait until Harper loses an election, you can actually win one on your merits. - The Disaffected Lib

The above is an excerpt from a post The Mound of Sound wrote last evening, a post that calls for re-engagement in and revitalization of our democracy. I offered the following comment on his site:

Your incisive comments are much appreciated, Mound. The question, however, seems to be how we motivate people to start caring about the dangerous departure from traditional values that has taken place in Canada, a departure that started well before the ascension of the Harper regime which, in my view, has only perfected the art of alienating the electorate from the political process.

All of the possible solutions to our dilemma seem to be rooted in having a party that truly cares about democracy in this country and is willing to work assiduously to reengage the public in the process, something I'm not sure the other two major parties really want beyond serving their political goal of wresting power from the Conservatives. I am frankly very dubious of Justin Trudeau who, as far as I can see, differs from Harper only in style, not in substance. If you examine the language of the NDP, they seem, if anything, to be vying for the centrist position on the spectrum, a position once occupied by the Liberals, with nary a word for 'the working class,' which has been largely supplanted by the phrase 'working families,' almost as if the former phrase is an embarrassing reminder of their provenance.

I have said several times on my own blog that Harper is quite happy to push the politics of disaffection and disillusionment to discourage people from participating in the political process, including elections, thereby leaving the field open for the 'true believers' who prevailed in the 2011 election.

People, I think, are hungry for genuine change. I just don't see that it is forthcoming from the other two major parties.

However, perhaps I have been looking at the issue too narrowly, placing too much responsibility on the other two major parties to lead the revitalization charge.

In a very interesting piece today, The Globe and Mail's Lawrence Martin discusses a new initiative by the Broadbent Institute that very well may help in the process. Taking its inspiration from the Manning Centre's success in cultivating the right,

The Broadbent Institute, viewed to date as a New Democratic front, is switching focus to the broader progressive cause, working not from a party point of view, but a policy and organizational one. As an example, in a few weeks, it will begin running training seminars across the country for political activists. They will pay a nominal fee for the type of instruction that young righties have been getting for years.

The problem, Martin observes, is that there is no unified left or, as I prefer, progressive movement. While entities deemed progressive abound in political, labour, environmental and economic spheres, the lack of a common cause or purpose has hampered any real coordination of effort. Nonetheless, these new efforts may ultimately bear fruit. For example, next week the Insitute is

... bringing to Ottawa the head honchos from the mother ship of U.S. progressive institutes, the Center for American Progress. With its $35-million budget, CAP is a huge support system for Democratic policies and political activity.

One awaits the outcome of this new direction with both hope and anticipation.

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Greg Selinger, Manitoba NDP Leader
and current Premier of Manitoba.

Image Source: WikipediaThere've been many warning signs for left progressives and social democrats when it comes to Premier Greg Selinger.

We all know that Gary Doer was uninspired, unprincipled, and singularly obsessed with appealing to suburbanites in southern Winnipeg. Be it boutique tax credits or boosterism for unsustainable suburbs like Waverley West, Doer sacrificed the long-term sustainability of our province for short-term political gain. It's quite fitting that he's now a oil sands salesman down in D.C.

When Selinger became Premier some thought he would lead slightly from the left. After all, he has an inspiring enough background. He's the son of a working, single-mom who started her own business in a poor, inner-city neighbourhood (which, come to think of it, might explain the 0% small business tax). A relative of his struggled with mental health problems. He's been a social (as opposed to party) activist in the past. To top it all of he had the wonkish acumen to make credible policies for the betterment of Manitoba.

But, sadly for the progressive left, there's signs of a more regressive Selinger.

Current finance minister Stan Struthers.

Thinks flat rate taxes are "fair"
because the "cost [will] be shared by
everyone". Fails to note the "regardless
of ability" caveat.

Image Source: The Manitoba Chambers
of Commerce First he backed Harper's E.I. deforms, effectively throwing unemployed workers under the bus.

Later, he hiked regressive user-fees after running an election campaign offering boutique tax credits to appeal to suburbanites.

Now, he's effectively throwing the working poor under the bus with a 14.3%, no low-income rebate, sales tax hike.

His finance minister Stan Struthers has embraced the flat-rate taxer conception of "fairness" to defend this.

"The PST is the fairest way to reach these goals because the cost will be shared by everyone," Struthers said, adding Manitoba's sales tax will remain the third-lowest in the country.

("Sales-tax hike to boost flood protection, but province first has to rewrite balanced-budget." Bruce Owen and Larry Kuschlaw (May 4, 2013). Winnipeg Free Press ) Selinger's finance minister is striking a stake through the moral centrepiece of fiscally progressive thought: that  those with less ability to pay should pay less. Struthers's flat taxer idea of fairness implies that a working poor janitor and a millionaire heir paying the same flat rate on their purchases is fair because "the cost [is] shared by everyone", regardless of financial capacity.




New fairness: Everyone shares the cost equally,
regardless of ability to pay.

Image Sources: Statigram (top)

J.G. Janitorial Services LtD (bottom) Without rebates (which the provincial Liberals have rightly argued for) the PST is grossly regressive. This is so because any small purchase will make up a larger share of a working poor Winnipegger's income than a wealthy heir's. Thus, flat rate sales taxes are regressive on the basis of income.

The 14.3% or 1 percentage point increase in the PST, along with the accumulation of user-fee hikes over the years, will disproportionately hurt the poor. This sharing of costs theme sounds a lot like the hollow pleas south of the 49th parallel for "shared sacrifice".

The weak, powerless, and those with broken backs do most of the hauling while the able wealthy carry a lighter load. Some "fairness".

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From the New Yorker.  Nicholas Thompson, on the crossing of the 400 ppm marker, tries to put our civilization's future in perspective, to show the moral collapse that we work so hard to ignore, and the brutal prospects we bequeath to our children and theirs.  It's something of a pre-mortem obituary.

We’ve got more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at any point since the Pliocene, when there were jungles in northern Canada. And the number hurdles ever upward, as ocean levels rise and extreme weather becomes routine. Three-fifty was the old target; four-fifty is the new one. But what indication is there that we’ll stop at five hundred, six hundred, or even more?

We’ve failed collectively. As Ryan Lizza explained in miserable detail in 2010, the United States government couldn’t pass a tepid, eviscerated law. Activists have failed. We’ve all failed morally: a problem created by the world’s rich will now crush the world’s poor. In a grand sense it’s also a failure of the creators, and deniers, of climate change: the Exxon-Mobils, say, or the Wall Street Journal editorial page. A victory isn’t worth much if your children and grandchildren will one day think of you with anger and shame.

How do we get out of this mess? The political system seems hopeless. Yes, government regulation has done much to relieve us of acid rain and smog. But global warming combines two intractable problems. Reducing emissions mainly benefits people who aren’t born and don’t vote. And it requires international coördination, which is hopeless, and international law, which is toothless. We should do things like build more public transportation, which helps people here and now. We should design our cities for a future with terrible weather. But solving the problem of climate change through the U.N. is like a small man with olive oil on his hands trying to pull a whale from the water.


Asking for personal sacrifice is fine for the West. We should ride bikes, turn off the lights, and eat less meat. But the number of people in the world who want cars, lights, and meat increases every day—and most are in countries that did very little to get us to four hundred. We can ask that China do a little better; there are a million little things that make emissions lower and our lives better. But the West created this problem through gluttony; we can’t solve it by demanding the asceticism of others. 

Ultimately, we have to invent our way out. Everything we use that emits carbon dioxide needs to be replaced with something that doesn’t, whether a car or a cooking stove. Many people are working toward this goal. Many more need to. And then there’s the dangerous, fraught, and potentially essential prospect of geoengineering. Can we suck carbon dioxide or methane down from the atmosphere? Can we shoot something up there that reduces the temperature? Every option is dangerous and complicated. But every option should be studied and tested. Geoengineering, as Michael Specter wrote last year, is the scientific equivalent of chemotherapy: it’s dreadful but it may be the only way to prevent mass calamity. And that calamity becomes ever more likely as the [greenhouse gas] numbers creep ever higher.

Last month, I wrote about the Sask Party's choice to redefine "privacy" to apply to corporations under Saskatchewan's securities legislation:
Until now, privacy has been recognized under Canadian law as being an individual right. As Justice La Forest wrote, "An expression of an individual's unique personality or personhood, privacy is grounded on physical and moral autonomy - the freedom to engage in one's own thoughts, actions and decisions..." These core concepts - an individual's unique personality, physical and moral autonomy, and freedom related to personal thoughts and actions - have no place whatsoever in discussing corporate interests.
...
(A) redefinition of privacy to benefit corporations would have consequences that might prove antithetical to a libertarian viewpoint. If a right intended to protect individuals from corporate and state intrusion gets turned on its head, there's no telling what individual interests might end up being annihilated in the name of corporate privacy - from negative reviews to whistleblowing to basic consumer and investor disclosure requirements.Well, it turns out that the Wall government had no interest in addressing that type of concern. And so, Bill 65 has been passed without any change to the bill's new declaration of a corporate privacy right.

In trying to make excuses for its determination to make words mean things they've never meant before, the best the Sask Party could do was to offer reassurances (PDF) that redefining "privacy" under one act wouldn't necessarily spill over into other legislation.

And it's true that the protection of personal information under (for example) the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act isn't directly changed by the wording of securities legislation. But that's largely because FOIP - rather than relying on the term "privacy" as its basis for protecting information - is instead highly specific in its definition of "personal information".

In contrast, the Privacy Act is deliberately broad in addressing breaches of privacy held by a "person" - a term which by law includes a corporation. And the Wall government's choice to declare the existence of corporate privacy under securities legislation will surely make it easier for corporations to argue that there's some legislative intent to create a cone of silence around corporate activity.

Again, the problem could have been avoided by simply mirroring the wording of FOIP and other statutes which protect genuinely confidential information and trade secrets without decreeing that all corporate activity is presumptively to be hidden from public view.

But the Sask Party has instead chosen to mangle the existing meaning of "privacy" to extend it to corporate interests - even after the issue was raised publicly. And we can only guess what fallout that will produce in the years to come.

The oil is sweet and the Sheikhs provide a good ride. The picture is self-explanatory.

…and attempt to apply a shine to the proverbial brown stuff. Nice try, kiddies. Time for your milk and cookies, but please wash up first. The riding of Labrador, by the way, was not stolen. That was last time, silly... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Karl Nerenberg reports on the House Finance Committee's hearings into income inequality in Canada, featuring a few familiar themes which we should hear far more often from our policy-makers:
"I would make all tax credits refundable, including the current non-refundable ones," Boadway recommended, and then went further, "I would condition many of them to income, the way we condition the GST credit. I would enhance disability tax credits and make them available to all provincial disability recipients."

On tax breaks for upper income Canadians and corporations, Boadway prescribed tough medicine: "I would eliminate the dividend tax credit and make the taxation of dividends, capital gains, and interest more even. I would rationalize the corporate tax to make it distortion-free and making it a tax on supernormal profits or so-called rents."
...
Corak would also expand the use of EI to support parental leave, based on the notion that family life, especially for those with precarious and low incomes, is under great stress these days.

And, like Boadway, Corak advocates for an expanded tax base, in particular targeting income from capital. He even suggested to the Committee that it might be the time to consider an inheritance tax in Canada.
...
The CMA President started by saying that the effectiveness of the health care system together with biology and heredity only account for about half of the totality of health outcomes -- outcomes which are measured by such indicators as incidence of disease, life expectancy, and rate of use of the health system.

"Having a much greater impact," Reid said, "Are factors such as the state of a person's housing, whether people get enough to eat, how educated they are and what kind of experiences they had in their early childhood."

These social determinants of health, she explained, account for fully half of health outcomes and "the most influential of these determinants is income."- But while our representatives are just starting to discuss the harm done by inequality, the corporate sector is looking to ensure that democratic decision-making does nothing to reduce it.

- Phil Plait takes note of the Cons' belief that science is worthless except to the extent it can be exploited for a profit. And Sixth Estate discusses why a mass-production market model looks to be utterly useless in addressing the steady evolution of bacteria.

- Finally, Lawrence Martin writes about the Broadbent Institute's work to provide a focal point for progressive organizing. But I do hope it's aiming higher than the Manning Centre for World Domination in terms of actually wanting to improve public engagement, rather than serving as a means of central control over activists, media and politicians alike.

Natalie Brender writes in The Toronto Star that, if disasters such as the factory collapse in Bangladesh are to be avoided in the future, we are going to have to stop acting as consumers and start acting as citizens. Private initiatives by non governmental agencies aren't enough:

As usual, the reason for this state of affairs is that things are complicated. The locations, actors, incentives and pressures involved in today’s global supply chains are so diverse and complex that uncoordinated action from any number of angles isn’t enough to make a major difference.

If private voluntary initiatives aren’t enough to produce consistent results, another solution is to weave them more closely together with governmental regulation. Getting government involved with buyers and suppliers across a given commercial field has the potential to ensure that all firms abide by common rules. Accordingly, new kinds of public-private partnerships are emerging. In some, national or regional governments work with the private sector to develop goals and metrics for compliance with environmental and labour standards. In other cases, a government might encourage corporate compliance with regulations by offering lighter penalties for violations in return for corporations’ transparency and disclosure.  
The assumption, of course, is that governments act not only in their own workers interests, but in the interests of workers across the world. And the present Government of Canada is going to do no such thing. It has firmly planted its flag in the employers camp. Trade deals are written to protect international investors; and -- as far as the Harperites are concerned -- citizens are consumers.

Brender's colleague at the Star, Susan Delacourt, has done a lot of work lately documenting the Conservative take on citizenship. In the Harperian universe, everything -- including the self respect of the Conservative caucus -- is for sale. The workers of Bangladesh and other Third World nations will continue to suffer as long as the present Government of Canada remains in power.

I doubt that any of this requires further explanation.

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