Back To The 19th Century

This week Stephen Harper indicated once again that he wants to return this country and its citizens to the 19th century. Bob Hepburn writes in the Toronto Star:

The latest slap at Canada’s independent image came this week when the Harper government announced our army will be tossing out the Canadian-style Maple Leaf rank designation on the shoulders of officers’ uniforms and restoring the traditional British Army-style stars, or “pips,” that existed until the 1960s.

Harper also is expected to restore British insignia and rank designations to our air force and navy.

Harper's latest move is consistent with earlier Harperian decrees:

In just the last two years, he has restored the word “Royal” to the official name of our navy and air force, ordered our embassies abroad and federal offices at home to display the Queen’s portrait prominently and agreed to have Canadian diplomats share office space in British embassies.

What is surprising is how tone deaf the prime minister is to Canadian opinion:

When “Royal” was put back into the navy and air force names, [Peter] MacKay said it was done to correct a “mistake,” a reference to the 1968 decision made by the Liberal government as part of its program to unify the forces.

As Harper moves to promote our outdated British ties with silly moves such as ridding the army of the Maple Leaf insignia, most Canadians have long tired of honouring the British royalty and traditions. 

Many commentators have noted the prime minister's morose turn of mind. He appears to be perpetually unhappy. Perhaps the explanation is that he feels he was born too late. Harper would  have been happy as a member of the Raj, or giving orders to troops during the Boer War.

Perhaps his next move will be to replace "O, Canada!" with "God Save The Queen."

On Board The Pequod

For me, there are two quintessential American novels. Huck Finn is about the American heart. Moby Dick is about the American soul. It is perhaps no accident, then, that Chris Hedges -- whose subject is the tortured American soul -- wrote this week that,"We are all aboard the Pequod." For Hedges, if the American ship of state continues on its present course, the result will be catastrophe, not just for the nation, but for the planet:

We, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess. We believe in the eternal wellspring of material progress. We are our own idols. Nothing will halt our voyage; it seems to us to have been decreed by natural law. “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run,” Ahab declares. We have surrendered our lives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death. Microbes will inherit the earth.

In our decline, hatred becomes our primary lust, our highest form of patriotism and a form of eroticism. We are made supine by hatred and fear. We deploy vast resources to hunt down jihadists and terrorists, real and phantom. We destroy our civil society in the name of a war on terror. We persecute those, from Julian Assange to Bradley Manning to Edward Snowden, who expose the dark machinations of power. We believe, because we have externalized evil, that we can purify the earth. We are blind to the evil within us. Melville’s description of Ahab is a description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television personalities and generals who through the power of propaganda fill our heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation.

He believes a collective madness has overtaken the country, a country which has forgotten the wisdom of its founding fathers. They knew, Hedges writes, that America's salvation lies in rebellion:

And so we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces that will finally smite us. Those who see where we are going lack the fortitude to rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequod’s crew. It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us into hostages.

Huck Finn is about moral courage. Huck is prepared to go to hell for helping his friend Jim escape. Huck, Twain wrote, is a boy with  "a sound heart and a deformed conscience." For Hedges, America is doomed as long as those with deformed consciences continue to captain the ship of state.


This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

New Faces, New Puppets

Vic Toews resigned from the Harper cabinet -- and politics -- yesterday. His is the latest departure from Team Harper, as the prime minister tries to put a new face on his government. But, writes Michael Harris:

It won’t work. Everyone knows who pulls the strings, no matter who is offering up the speaking points on television — and the puppet-master himself is not popular these days.

The Harper government has always been a one man show -- and now that one man is in the doghouse. The Wright-Duffy Affair is something which Canadians instinctively understand. And they know that Mr. Harper is desperate:

The PM has been all over the map on this file. First, the government’s line was Senator Duffy had paid back the money and was displaying “leadership” in the expenses scandal. That Edsel didn’t get very far down the road.

Then Harper’s robots tried the narrative that Nigel Wright gave Duffy $90,000 because he was the soul of friendship and generosity, just trying to help out a guy who was in over his head. Stephen Harper endorsed that fiction by saying shortly after the story broke that Wright had his “confidence” and would not be resigning.

Then funny things started to happen on the way to the RCMP investigation. In the prime minister’s eyes, Senator Duffy went from being a “leader” in the expenses scandal to being a person who had some questions to answer. Gone from caucus.

Next, Nigel Wright was no longer Robin Hood and no longer had the PM’s confidence. Instead, he resigned and became the man who “acted alone” in doing the secret deal with Duffy.

Stephen Harper -- the ultimate control freak -- has lost control of the story; and, for the first time since he became prime minister, his machinations aren't working. Mr. Harper and truth have always been distant relatives. But now truth has finally caught up with the prime minister.

And, when it comes to cabinets, the truth is that all the members of the inner circle sound like Stephen Harper

Healthcare Is Next

In today's Toronto Star, Natalie Mehra and Michael McBane warn that the Harper government is taking aim at Medicare. For the system to work, the prime minister needs to meet with his provincial counterparts. However,

This summer’s gathering of the premiers marks the final Council of the Federation meeting before 2014, when the National Health Accord expires. Penned in 2004, the 10-year health accord set priorities to improve access to health care and established a new funding formula.

The meetings do not include the federal government and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will not be in Niagara. What many Canadians do not realize is that there are no first ministers’ gatherings of all the premiers and the prime minister anymore. Harper refuses to attend them.

Even  more importantly, Harper has refused to talk about two cornerstones of an evolving medicare program:

In 2004 the provinces, territories and federal government established a National Pharmaceutical Strategy. Finally, progress was promised toward a national drug coverage program that would actually cut overall drug costs through bulk buying and better co-ordination. But since their election, the Harper Conservative government has refused to participate in this committee, effectively killing the dream of national drug coverage and stalling progress on reducing drug prices for the better part of the last decade.

In 2004, out of the health accord discussions, the provinces and federal government also began work to discuss home and continuing care. Progress on creating a national home and continuing care strategy is vital for more than a million Canadians who struggle with high out-of-pocket costs for post-hospital care.

Harper's antipathy to public healthcare is unmistakable. Mehra and McBane write:

In fact, the federal Conservative government’s antipathy to public medicare is becoming more and more overt. Not only has it walked away from the table on a national drug program and home care, it has also bluntly refused to meet with the provincial governments about renewing the funding formula for health care. Instead, the federal government plans to reduce funding from current projections by $36 billion in upcoming years, reversing the gains made in the health accord. In the latest budget, the government cut the Health Council of Canada as well as health services for veterans and refugees. The federal health minister has done nothing to implement the National Mental Health Strategy and has taken no action to uphold single-tier medicare in the face of private clinics extra-billing patients in provinces like British Columbia.

Mr. Harper is a one man wrecking ball. He was absolutely serious when he declared that we wouldn't recognize Canada when he was through with it. He, quite literally, is a hazard to your health.

The "Primitives" Have Got It Right

In a recent article, Noam Chomsky asks the question we should all be asking: "Who will defend the earth?" The people who are desperately interested in the answer to that question are people we have traditionally thought of as "backward." But, Chomsky writes, they understand what is at stake:

That the Earth now desperately needs defense from impending environmental catastrophe is surely obvious to any rational and literate person. The different reactions to the crisis are a most remarkable feature of current history.

At the forefront of the defense of nature are those often called “primitive”: members of indigenous and tribal groups, like the First Nations in Canada or the Aborigines in Australia - the remnants of peoples who have survived the imperial onslaught. At the forefront of the assault on nature are those who call themselves the most advanced and civilized: the richest and most powerful nations.

And, the answer to that question is at the heart of the turmoil which presently roils in Turkey: 

The struggle to defend the commons takes many forms. In microcosm, it is taking place right now in Turkey’s Taksim Square, where brave men and women are protecting one of the last remnants of the commons of Istanbul from the wrecking ball of commercialization and gentrification and autocratic rule that is destroying this ancient treasure.

The defenders of Taksim Square are at the forefront of a worldwide struggle to preserve the global commons from the ravages of that same wrecking ball - a struggle in which we must all take part, with dedication and resolve, if there is to be any hope for decent human survival in a world that has no borders. It is our common possession, to defend or to destroy.

We have become obsessed with the notion of private property, while we have forgotten the concept of the public commons. And, if we refuse to accept the idea that we are all in this together, the planet will collapse. In fact, it is well on the way to collapse.

The so called advanced people are the real primitives.

It's Happened Before

Documents released yesterday indicate that, contrary to what Stephen Harper says, there were more people than Nigel Wright involved in the pay off to Mike Duffy. Most interesting of all is the revelation that Senator Irving Gertsein, who controls Conservative Party funds, was prepared to pony up $30,000 to help Duffy pay his bill -- until Gerstein discovered that Duffy's tab was three times bigger than that.

Paul Wells writes that this isn't the first time party money was used to try and make a problem go away:

At the beginning of the campaign for the 2006 election, an Ottawa lawyer named Alan Riddell stepped aside as the Conservatives’ nominated candidate in the Ottawa South riding. The party wanted to run Alan Cutler, a public servant who had blown the whistle on the Liberal sponsorship scandal, in the riding. Besides, as a candidate Riddell was, to some extent, less than ideal. He had run for the Conservatives in 2004 and lost after the Ottawa Sun ran an embarrassing story about a prank Riddell had played in his student days. (He’d dressed up as a character from Hogan’s Heroes, and I don’t mean Corporal LeBeau. A bit of a no-no, in retrospect.) After he lost the Sun retracted much of its story, but the damage was done. So, under some pressure from the party in 2006, Riddell dropped out, the party thanked him for his efforts, and Cutler became the candidate.

Then a CBC reporter asked Riddell why he had pulled out of the race so late. Riddell replied that the party made it easy by agreeing to cover his campaign expenses. He put the cost at about $50,000. Reporters following Harper on the campaign trail promptly asked him about the deal with Riddell. “In fact there is no agreement and he hasn’t been paid anything,” Harper said. When asked again later that day — it was the end of 2005 and Harper was still the kind of guy who might deign to scrum twice in one day — he repeated himself: “The party does not have an agreement to pay Mr. Riddell these expenses, and Mr. Riddell has not been paid anything to date.”

Unfortunately for Harper’s version of events, there was an email trail, which somebody on Riddell’s campaign promptly leaked to reporters. Riddell wound up suing the party for his expenses. On January 11, 2007, Judge Denis Power of Ontario Superior Court ruled “that Alan M. Riddell and the Conservative Party of Canada entered into a binding agreement on November 25, 2005.” He could hardly reach any other conclusion. Among the evidence produced in court was a November 25 email from Mike Donison, the Conservatives’ former director general, to Riddell’s lawyer. The email read, in part: “There is now a binding agreement between Mr. Riddell and the Conservative Party of Canada.”

And, of course, there was that story about Chuck Cadman -- another candidate who Harper had dumped -- who ran as an independent and was re-relected in his riding. Harper needed Cadman's vote to bring down the Martin government in 2005. The story making the rounds was that the dying Cadman was offered a large insurance policy to take care of his widow. But Cadman could not be bought.

Mr. Harper has denied any and all suggestions that he had anything to do with such nefarious schemes. The pattern is pretty clear. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

The Last Progresive Conservative

Stephen Harper is about to shuffle his cabinet. And those who are presently in it -- but who will not run in the next election -- are taking their leave. Among them is Ted Menzies. Jeffrey Simpson writes:

Mr. Menzies was the last former Alberta Progressive Conservative left in the new Conservative Party created by Stephen Harper. When Mr. Menzies sought the nomination, he ran against a clutch of Reform Party types who cancelled each other out and allowed him to slide to victory. Once nominated, the election was a formality.

All the other Alberta Conservative MPs are either from the old Reform Party or weren’t involved in electoral politics before running for office. With his departure, the Alberta caucus will shift just a bit further to the right.

And, even if the players change, they will all be singing from the same hymnal:

This government’s tone and style are beginning to wear on more and more Canadians. The ferocious partisanship, the excessive secrecy, the negative television ads, the mendacity directed at opponents, the overwhelming sense that enemies (including most of the media, of course) abound, the almost manic preoccupation with spin and image and now the little scandals from the Senate have created the impression, outside the Conservative core, of a government that has ideology and agenda but not much heart, empathy, feeling or understanding for anyone who doesn’t share that ideology and agenda.

Simpson ends with a seminal question:

Ask yourself: How many senior Conservatives smile? Most are so scripted by the Prime Minister’s Office that they dare not show whatever humour they possess, or they turn it into sarcastic blasts at the opposition.

The Conservative Party -- like the man who heads it -- is now officially, and thoroughly, a nasty piece of work.

Austerity Kills

In their book, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu demonstrate that, around the world, austerity has had devastating consequences on public health. Consider what economic shock therapy accomplished in the Soviet Union:

The Soviet economy collapsed in the early 1990s, erasing countless jobs. Ironically, those still working in public health kept good records of the disaster. Stuckler and Basu studied death certificates and found that "The rate of death rose by a disconcerting 90 per cent among the subgroup of men aged twenty-five to thirty-nine, in the prime of their lives."

The statistics showed that they died, in effect, from stress -- expressed in "alcohol poisonings, suicides, homicides, and injuries." And heart attacks. 

On the other hand, consider the case of Iceland:

Having hosted an offshore-banking industry that imploded, the country experienced some noisy demonstrations that forced the government to hold a referendum: Should Icelanders pay to honour the debts of their bankers, or not?

The answer was no, much to the alarm of the EU. But the Icelanders toughed out the recession without sacrificing too many jobs or social support programs. Stuckler and Basu followed the Icelandic health records: death rates kept falling, and heart-attack rates were unchanged. So were rates of depression. People were working and earning less, but self-reported as feeling pretty good. 

Or consider what has happened in Britain:

Britain coped fairly well under Gordon Brown's Labour government in the early years of the Great Recession, but David Cameron's Tory-LibDem coalition has caused a public-health disaster.

The evidence -- when people pay attention to it -- is clear:

The real key to economic growth is not to cut social programs, but to boost them. Every dollar spent on healthcare and education actually generates three dollars in the economy. And why not? A healthy, educated, economically secure population will ride out recessions in far better shape than one trying to cope with joblessness, depression, and alcohol.

In the end, Stuckler and Basu write:

Had the austerity experiments been governed by the same rigorous standards as clinical trials, they would have been discontinued long ago by a board of medical ethics. … Instead of austerity, we should enact evidence-based policies to protect health during hard times. … Ultimately austerity has failed because it is unsupported by sound logic or data. It is an economic ideology. It stems from the belief that small government and free markets are always better than state intervention.

Their conclusion is worth remembering when Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty  tell us that their economic program is good for what ails us.

Running Scared

The Harper Government, Michael Harris writes, is running scared. It's now patently obvious that its claim to fame -- competent management -- is unadulterated flap doodle:

The PM and his government are not good managers. The nauseating repetition of the claim that the Tories know what they’re doing with the country’s finances will not make it so.

They’ve pissed away more money than Madonna on a shopping spree — a billion on the G 8-20 meetings that put a dent in the world’s Perrier supply and little else.

They just plain lost $3.2 billion and the guy in charge over at Treasury Board is still there, rumoured to be on his way to Finance.

They are such good fiscal managers that we now have the highest deficit in our history. I know, I know, it’s the fault of those damn Europeans who didn’t listen to Steve about austerity.

Nor has the man who came to Ottawa to trim big government delivered on that commitment. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, the Conservative government has added 34,000 jobs to the public service between 2006 and 2012, raising the federal payroll by 14 per cent.

And, therefore, the prime minister now insists that secrecy is the order of the day:

Secrecy over budget numbers, secrecy over the sticker price for new jets, secrecy over where cabinet meets — all secrecy, all the time. As Jim Bronskill recently reported, the PM is now trying to enforce blanket secrecy over eleven federal agencies — retroactively and for all time.

The jig is up. The survival strategy is to hide. But it's too late for that.

Recent History Is Repeating Itself

StatsCan's latest report on household income gives the lie to the Harper government's claim that it knows how to manage the nation's economy. The Huffington Post reports that:

StatsCan’s latest analysis of income trends among families of two or more people found that 2011 “was the fourth consecutive year without significant change in after-tax income.”

Over the four years from 2007 to 2011, median income for families grew a tepid 1.9 per cent, to $68,000 from $66,700. That’s a growth rate of less than 0.5 per cent per year.

What it means is that consumers -- who the Royal Bank says are the "lynch pin" of the Canadian economy -- are tapped out. RBC predicts that:

Canada will see years of economic growth below the rates seen in the U.S., as Canadian consumers start to spend more cautiously and pay down their debt.

And government cutbacks are partially responsible for the loss of family income:

Part of what appears to be keeping Canadian incomes stagnant is declining transfer payments from government. StatsCan’s data found that the median amount of money transferred from the government to families -- things such as the child tax benefit, unemployment insurance, or welfare -- fell to $6,000 in 2011 from $6,700 in 2010.

Seniors saw their median government payments drop by $600 over the year.

The reason the United States went into deep recession in 2008 was that wealth was sucked to the top of the economic pyramid, while wealth at the much wider bottom of the pyramid dried up. Canada appears to be headed down the same path.

Keep The Militarism Out Of It

It's traditional to look back at our history on Canada Day. And on this Canada Day -- our 146th -- the Harper government has decided to review whether we teach our history the "right" way. Specifically, it feels that not enough emphasis is placed on our military prowess. Tom Walkom writes, in The Toronto Star, that Canada Day is a day for nationalism, not jingoism. The government is correct, he says, when it claims that Canadian citizenship has been devalued:

Where the Conservative government is off base, however, is in its attempts to refocus history solely on Canada’s military successes in war.

War is not unimportant. Canadians have fought in many — from early conflicts that pitted aboriginal nations against one another to Afghanistan and Libya.

But not everything is war. And not all wars in which Canadians took part were necessarily virtuous. To think otherwise is to veer into jingoism, where our team is always right simply because it is our team and the other guys (whoever they are) are always scumbags.

And, so, the Harperites spent a lot of money trying to convince Canadians that the War of 1812 was a glorious example of Canadians standing on guard for thee. The problem with that thesis is that war is never glorious.

My father was a World War II vet. Before the days of satellites, he was trained as an aerial photographer, tasked with the job of  photographing potential bombing targets. But, when he finished his training, he was given command of an anti-aircraft battery. Thus, he spent most of the war shooting at targets, rather than photographing them -- and, in the process -- becoming one himself. He survived and came home, he said, because of pure dumb luck. Most of those he trained with never came home. My mother's first husband died in Europe and, like my father's fellow trainees, never came home.

The Harperite taste for militarism is the dream of adolescents who have never been tested in the crucible of war. One suspects they couldn't survive boot camp.  Canada has always been the impossible country -- a huge land mass with a sparse population, whose constituent parts have managed to survive for 146 years. One hopes the country will survive the Harperites.

The Fevered Dreams Of Blue-Eyed Sheiks

Not seeing the forest for the trees. It's the classic characterization of tunnel vision. An updated version of the old saw might be not seeing the shale for the pipeline. That, writes Jeffrey Simpson, is the disease which afflicts our present political masters:

Recently, the U.S. Energy Information Agency produced an estimate that the U.S. has almost 60 billion barrels of “technically recoverable” shale oil. Now, “technically recoverable” does not mean that all this supply will be used. Nor does it mean, however, that supplies the agency knows about today will not increase, perhaps substantially, as new deposits are discovered or innovative technologies for discovery and extraction are found. All that can be said is that 60 billion barrels of “technically recoverable” oil is a godsend for the United States.

Whether you pollute the air or the ground water, you wind up in the same place. But consider that information from the American perspective:

Every barrel of oil that the U.S. can supply for itself reduces the country’s current account deficit, strengthens its economy and, most important, makes the country less vulnerable to international events in faraway places, some of which are notoriously volatile and shot through with anti-American attitudes. U.S. policy-makers – and ordinary citizens – therefore assign a very high priority to reducing and, if possible, eliminating their country’s dependence on oil imports, especially from the Middle East and Venezuela.

That oil will continue to warm the planet. Until we use clean, renewable energy, we will further the planet's collapse. But that shale oil also spells the collapse of our blue-eyed sheiks. Their fevered dreams are coming to an end.

He's Losing His Grip

Lawrence Martin writes that the cracks are spreading at Fortress Harper. First it was those ornery backbenchers who refused to shut up. Then one of them, Brent Rathgeber, resigned. And, last week, sixteen Conservative senators joined with their Liberal colleagues to gut a Harper supported private member's bill which would  have crippled unions.  Martin writes:

While sending the union bill back to the Commons with amendments prompted PMO anger, these Conservatives have done themselves and their party proud by voting according to what they thought was right. With the exception of Conservative hardliners, the legislation — a private member’s bill — was widely viewed in the party as a spiteful piece of labour-bashing. Its aim was to compel unions to disclose all payments made by them to outside groups or individuals worth $5,000 or more and to reveal the names and salaries of union employees paid more than $100,000.

The senator who spearheaded the drive was Hugh Segal, who used to work for Bill Davis -- before Mike Harris, Jim Flaherty, Tony Clement and John Baird rode into Queens Park. Segal owes the prime minister nothing. He was appointed by Paul Martin. But that was back in the days when Senate appointments could be made on the basis on merit, not blind loyalty.

Unfortunately, Tory youth appear to follow Mr.Harper like lemmings:

One group he appears to have marching in lockstep with him is the Tory youth. The work of his senators stood in marked contrast to another piece of news that made headlines for the party this week: the party planting interns to disrupt a Justin Trudeau rally on Parliament Hill. The paid interns, apparently acting with the approval of the PMO, waved placards spouting lines the Conservatives used in their grossly distorted attack ads on the Liberal leader.

It was another indication of the degree to which the level of morality in the party has sunk. This is a tactic something straight out of the Nixon White House’s book of dirty tricks.

The question is, where is the Conservative soul?  Is it in Segal's hands -- or Stephen Harper's?

Do They Get It?

Andrew Nikiforuk loves his city and his province. Both, he writes, have had a "Manhattan moment:"

We thought we were big and powerful and beyond humbling just like New York. But as every true cowboy knows, Mother Nature invariably has the last word.

And so Calgarians are now living a chronicle foretold by climate scientists. 

For years those scientists have warned about such disasters. But science doesn't cut much mustard with Alberta conservatives:

In 2005 the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative promised warming temperatures, melting glaciers, variable rainfall, changes in stream flows, accelerated evaporation and more extreme events.

In 2006 climate scientist Dave Sauchyn told a Banff audience that "droughts of longer duration and greater frequency, as well as unusual wet periods and flooding" would be the new forecast. Meanwhile researchers documented a 26-day shift in the onset of spring in Alberta over the past century.

Five years later the Bow River Council concluded that "Our rapidly growing population demands much of the land and water. Our climate is changing and the future of our water supplies is uncertain."

In 2010 the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, an agency that the Harper government killed last year because it didn't like its messages on climate change, reported that changing precipitation patterns were "the most common gradual, long-term risk from a changing climate identified by Canadian companies." 

So one has to ask the question: Do they -- particularly that Toronto-born cowboy who heads our government -- finally get it?

The Future Is -- Retail

Statscan reports that, when it comes to employment in Canada, the future is in retailing.We no longer make things. We sell things that other people make. According to The Toronto Star:

“Retail salesperson” was ranked as the most common occupation for both women (4.7 per cent) and men (3.3 per cent), according to the survey.

The retail sector boasted 1.9 million workers, representing 11.5 per cent of the country’s workforce, overtaking manufacturing as the largest field of employment for Canadians.

Manufacturing, which in 2006 employed 11.8 per cent of Canadian workers, dropped to third place at 9.2 per cent. Health care and social assistance sectors now run a close second to retail at 11.4 per cent, according to the survey.

Unfortunately, retailing provides the most precarious kind of employment. Armine Yalnizyan of The Centre for Policy Alternatives says:

“The more our economic recovery and growth is based on a sector known for its low wages and for ignoring pensions and benefits, the more fragile the recovery is,”

“To the extent that we are now largely reliant on one of the sectors that is most likely to treat workers as disposable, this is a cautionary note,”

And, as wages fall, Canadians go into debt to pay their bills:

Jonathan Hunter, 47, says he’s lucky he doesn’t have a family because he doesn’t know how he would support one on his retail wages.

“I make enough to live on, but I don’t have any kids,” said the shoe repair store clerk. “If I did, that would be a problem.”

Hunter, who has worked in retail for most of his life, says he hasn’t seen the dentist in years because benefits in his line of work are rare.

Jessica Clausen, 24, sells men’s shirts on Yonge St. for $10.25 an hour, but still clings to the hope of becoming a Broadway star. The drama school graduate has been working in retail for several years while she dabbles in community theatre and waits for her big break.

“My job title is actor, which means I work in retail,” she said, with a laugh.

A report on unstable work and household wellbeing released in February found that barely half of Toronto and Hamilton-area workers have permanent, full-time work with benefits. As a result, these workers experience increased household stress and limited ability to participate in their communities, said the report by McMaster University and United Way Toronto

“Retail is often a place-holder for university students who can’t find work in their field, but they often never escape because there is nothing to move on to,” said the report’s author Wayne Lewchuk, a labour and economics professor at McMaster University.

“For others who were turfed out of good jobs, it’s the only place they can go,” he said.

Jim Flaherty says that the reason Canadians on EI are being forced off the rolls is because there is no such thing as a bad job. You'd expect the man who has had a hand in building this brave new world to say that.

Economic Obsessions

Those of us who are appalled by the Harper government have taken some hope for the future as we have watched the PMO implode. But Edward Greenspon warns that, when the next election arrives, it will probably still be fought not on Harperian ethics but on the Harperian economy.

Mr. Harper claims that he is obsessed by the economy. It's true that he is obsessed by a manifestly false proposition -- that wealth creates jobs. But Harper's real obsessions are two: The Liberal Party of Canada and pipelines.

Harper is particularly obsessed by the Liberals, now that the son has also risen. And he should have experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach yesterday, after President Obama did not give his full throated support to the Keystone XL pipeline. As for the economy in general, Greenspon writes:

It’s always difficult to determine whether an economy is half-empty or half-full. Certainly, last month’s job creation numbers were cause for optimism and first-quarter growth was on the upswing. Plans look on course to eliminate the federal deficit in 2015. But five years on, our reserves of resiliency are running dangerously low. There’s little room for manoeuvre should another shock come our way.

In the highly unusual type of “balance sheet recession” the world has experienced, the point is for the public sector to pump tons of stimulus into the economy while private players take a timeout and rebuild their finances. That’s what has happened in the hard-hit United States, where banks have bounced back, personal debt has fallen and house prices are rising again.

But households in Canada never paused. Their combined debts now stand at an astronomical 165 per cent of disposable income, similar levels to the U.S. at the peak of its folly. Canadians can only get away with this because interest rates are nearly subterranean. Once rates rise or housing prices fall, trouble will find us. On a recent visit to Canada, the pro-stimulus economist Paul Krugman expressed concern that Canada is primed to take some kind of hit.

It wasn't public debt that caused the Great Recession. It was private debt. And Harper's slashing of Employment Insurance and public employment has merely exacerbated the problem of private debt. In short, 2008 taught Stephen Harper nothing.

Unfortunately, Tom Mulcair doesn't have a high profile on the economy. And Justin Trudeau has no record on that file.  The prospects for the future are not particularly inspiring.

Blatant Hypocrisy

Martin Regg Cohn calls Rob Ford's bluster, after his meeting with Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa, exactly what  it is -- blatant hypocrisy.  And Cohn provides a little historical context:

Once upon a government, when the Mike Harris Tories downloaded social services upon Toronto (with Rob Ford’s father, Douglas, serving faithfully as a backbench MPP), the cash-strapped city got temporary compensation. After 2003, when the Dalton McGuinty Liberals started uploading those services back, it was always understood the financial transfers weren’t forever.

Now that Toronto is coming out ahead financially, it’s time to wind down the compensation, Sousa says. Not so, counters Ford, who wants the gravy to keep flowing.

Ford barged into office railing against gravy trains, then proceeded to cut taxes and costs. But, while Ford and his brother fume at the Liberals, they know that Tim Hudak would have delivered the same message:

The mayor is being a predictably apoplectic hypocrite: He knows that today’s Tory opposition — the very party his father Douglas once served, and that his big brother Doug (now a councillor) aspires to join in the next provincial election — would cease uploading municipal services, burdening Toronto’s finances far more.

Yet Ford persists with his posturing, demanding an extra helping of gravy because he is addicted to the substance. It allows him to live in a hallucinatory world where he can cut local taxes and then demand, with a straight face, that Queen’s Park make up the difference.

Like so many conservatives these days, Ford rails against gravy trains, while he insists that he has a ticket to ride.

The man -- in so many ways -- isn't who he says he is.

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

Senator Colin Kenny has written an important op-ed in this morning's Toronto Star. The central thrust of the piece is that the Harper government's approach to foreign aid is sheer folly. Kenny writes:

That Harper would pull CIDA out of some of the poorest countries in the world — like Malawi and Niger — and shift its focus to countries Canada wants to increase trade was reprehensible for a government committed to stand on firm moral principles in its international dealings.

That Canada would announce earlier this year that it was pulling out of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification — signed on to by 194 countries — fell into the same moral quagmire. Harper’s rationale was that the convention was too bureaucratic, but the strong suspicion is that this government doesn’t want anything to do with any scientific battles against climate change.

That the government would cut the last year’s foreign aid budget by 7.5 per cent — bringing it down to 0.31 per cent of GDP — was a sad step in the wrong direction.

And what were the consequences of that 7.5% cut?

At the end of the 2012-2013 fiscal year, CIDA had lapsed approximately $800 million in spending. Traditionally, departments who lapse funds approved by Parliament are considered blunderers. But this was no blunder. It was clearly done by design, at the top.

The agency effectively took the money away from the world’s unfortunate and handed it back to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who is busily working toward the government’s promise to reduce the federal budget deficit to zero by election time. After that open budget cut of 7.5 per cent, the government sneaked behind the curtains and chopped the agency’s disbursements by another 20 per cent.

Kenny contrasts the Harper approach to foreign aid to that of British prime minister David Cameron:

Despite the fact that Britain’s economy is in a far more precarious state than Canada’s, Cameron has increased Britain’s foreign aid budget to 0.56 per cent of his country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and committed himself to hitting the UN’s international target of 0.7 per cent a year from now.

And Cameron is unapoligetic about the increase in foreign aid:

When speaking about his initiative to fight world hunger, Cameron pointed out that more than 60 per cent of the world’s malnourished children live in fragile and conflicted states. “We understand that if we invest in countries before they get broken, we might not end up spending so much on dealing with problems — whether that’s immigration or threats to our national security.”

As in everything else they do, the Harper government is penny wise and pound foolish.

They're In The Money

"In Ottawa," Michael Den Tandt wrote last week, "money sloshes around like water in a tub." Things have gotten worse since Stephen Harper ditched Jean Chretien's modest attempt to provide some public funding for elections.  Some defend the status quo; but voters are furious. They demand transparency:

Some will lament this heightened scrutiny, bordering on hostility, as the latest debasement of an already frayed relationship between democratically elected representatives, most of whom are sincere and work hard, and the polity. If all politicians are assumed to be liars, cheats and crooks, what good person will run for office? Would a young Bob Rae, Ed Broadbent or Preston Manning do so today given the soup of incivility, meanness, suspicion and stupidity that now comes with the job?

That's Wall Street's argument. If you want talent, you have to pay for it. But the pay is pretty good, even for the not so talented:

For many others, $160,200 is the most they’ve ever earned in a year, or ever will. The average salaried worker in Canada brings home under $50,000. The MP’s job itself is a privilege, rich with perquisites even with the slavering hordes of the media mouth-breathing in the background.

The Wall Street mentality has driven the Harper government. And now it is reaping what it has sown. Like the big banks, Harper Inc. has sold its integrity  -- and squandered its credibility.

Creative Destruction?

The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote that capitalism encouraged "creative destruction." Tom Walkom writes that The Great Recession has been all about destruction:

In Canada, we are said to be doing well. The official unemployment statistics show Canadian joblessness at a high but tolerable level of roughly 7 per cent.

But those official statistics disguise the profound changes in work that are taking place — the move from full to part-time employment, the erosion of job security, the growing wage gap between those fortunate enough to be near the top and everyone else.

The powers that be continue to encourage that destruction:

Europe’s effort to integrate diverse countries through a common currency has bankrupted Greece, savaged Cyprus and destroyed job prospects for an entire generation in Spain, Italy and Portugal.

France is in trouble, Britain is fraying around the edges. Even the success stories of globalization — such as Brazil and Turkey — are facing political pushback.

In Turkey, a small dispute over a park led to widespread and violent riots. In Brazil, the trigger for mass protests was an increase in bus fares.

None of this should come as a surprise. Those making economic policy from afar may admire creative destruction. Those being destroyed rarely do.

In Canada that destruction is best illustrated by the evisceration of the Employment Insurance System:

Employment insurance has become particularly irrelevant. A new study by the Canadian Labour Congress calculates that only 35 per cent of the jobless now qualify for EI. In Ontario, the percentage is 25; in Toronto 20.

As CLC senior economist Angella MacEwen explains, this has occurred in part because of government attempts to narrow EI’s scope.

But the other reason is that the slump has gone on so long. Many of the unemployed who at one point did qualify for EI benefits have simply used them up.

There's not much creativity anywhere. Perhaps the powers that be are simply stupid.