I'm Sure It Is All Very Innocent

 On the 'contradictory' relationship PP has with corporate lobbyists:

H/t trapdinawrpool.bsky.social

For Your Consideration

In a time when reflexive rather than reflective responses are elicited by some of our politicians, a little food for thought from Patrick Corrigan. Axe the tax, spike the hike, bring it home and other such mindless slogans may never be quite the same again.

The High Price Of Populism

In this age of economic deprivation for so many, it is understandable that people seek relief wherever they can find it. Some do without, some shop at discount stores, some take second jobs. Unfortunately, some embrace whomever seems to be offering a helping hand. 

Here in Ontario, that 'helping' hand comes from populist politicians, most notably our own Will Loman ("Be well-liked and you will never want"), Doug Ford. Like the salesman he was through his Deco Labels business, which he still owns, Ford has never lost his appetite for public approval. And that propensity is leading all of us down a very dark economic road.

The province's latest budget, unveiled the other day, projects a tripling of the deficit to $9.8 billion, piling on top of the current debt of almost $400 billion. The government argues that it necessary to keep spending in these economically challenging times and making life more affordable for people.

And therein lies the rub. While the deficit and debt continue to grow, our populist premier is surrendering huge sources of revenue via an extension of the gas tax reduction, the ongoing elimination of auto plate renewal charges, massive subsidies to keep the price of hydro lower, and having the public pick up the tab for developers' charges, at the same time giving below-inflation increases to vital services like health care, education, etc.

Not everyone is fooled by this fiscal sleight-of-hand. Certainly, Toronto Star readers are not. Here are two of their letters

Perhaps if the Doug Ford government hadn't been so enthusiastic about shredding long-term stable revenue streams it wouldn't be in the deficit position it now finds itself. Since 2018 the province has lost approximately $1 billion a year each from the cancellation of the greenhouse gas cap and trade program, the elimination of vehicle licensing fees and reductions in the provincial gasoline tax. To this has to be added the billions in provincial revenues that are now having to be diverted to municipalities to pay for infrastructure needed to support housing, making up for the development charge revenues that were lost through Bill 23 — the infamous Building More Homes Faster Act. Then there is the ongoing $7 billion annual diversion of revenues to artificially lower hydro rates and hide the actual costs of nuclear refurbishments. In the longer term the costs of financing the government's "get it done" megaprojects, many of which, like the Highway 413, the Bradford Bypass and Pickering B nuclear refurbishment, have been previously assessed as uneconomic, unnecessary and destructive, has to be considered as well, in a context of increased interest rates. Beyond the long-term environmental and climate consequences of these choices, different decisions would have left the province far better positioned to make needed investments in areas like education and health care.

Mark S. Winfield, Toronto

Gas tax cut diminished government revenues 

The Ford government could handily have trimmed its deficit in this latest budget by cancelling its gas tax cut. By the government’s own admission, this tax cut has diminished government revenues by $2.1 billion over the past two and a half years. Might not all that money have been more helpful providing affordable housing, supporting public transit, and fixing our overburdened health-care system?

Kenneth Oppel, Toronto

For people like Doug Ford, life and politics are but a shell game, one that fools far too many people far too often. But in the end, we all wind up paying a very steep price.

Donald Trump: Can I Get a Big Amen?

From the theatre of the absurd comes Donald Trump's latest scam. He will be getting royalties from this special edition Bible. Truly, we are in The End Times.

A Kevin O'Leary Takedown

John Stewart - love the guy. Kevin O'Leary - detest the guy. Blowhards have always rubbed me the wrong way. Happily, the two diametrically opposed personages are together in the following video. Spoiler alert: John Stewart wins as he exposes O'Leary's venality and hypocrisy, traits that seem endemic amongst "his kind."

The History American Politicians Try To Keep Hidden

I have done a great deal of reading in the past couple of years on The Civil War, slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow laws that followed it,  Black Codes, and the mythology of The Lost Cause. An obvious and irrefutable conclusion to be drawn is that America is a racist country with a racist history, a history that many American states (most egregiously Florida) would deny both white and Black citizens access to.

Of course, not everyone has either the time or the inclination to study the atrocities that were the foundation of the American economy, atrocities that served well both the plantation owners and the industries in the North that utilized their chief crop, cotton. But as the saying goes, one picture is worth a thousand words, and a brief video many times that. The following offers an effective and moving depiction of the ugliness of racism.

If you would like to see an extended version of this report, please click here.

Mr. Mulroney's Legacy

Willy Loman - Death of A Salesman

Brian Mulroney - Late Canadian Salesman

In a previous post, I discussed what I considered to be one of the shortcomings of the late prime minister, Brian Mulroney: his essential shallowness. But it is the damage many say he did to this country thanks, in part, to his fawning admiration of America and American corporations, that he may be best remembered for.

Amidst the many encomiums that have followed Mulroney's demise, two columnists write critically about what his unseemly trait led to: the original free trade deal with our neighbours to the south. Our delusional Willy Loman surrogate, Brian Mulroney, thought of it as one of the highlights of his life, but those columnists beg to differ.

Reflecting on the praise heaped upon the late prime minister, Rick Salutin writes:

The result of his 1988 free trade deal with the U.S. was that good industrial jobs shifted to low wage nations while workers stayed put and rummaged for poorer jobs at home. As manufacturing ‘hollowed out,’ the economy got “financialized,” focusing on money manipulations like mergers among the wealthy players, while workers were marooned in areas like services, retail and eventually, precarious “gigging.” This in turn widened the gap between the rich and the rest, expanding poverty, while the middle classes diminished. The main source of wealth for the majority became their homes, not their jobs, a shakey situation that left the generation now entering the workforce with scant hope of even owning a home.

Mulroney initially opposed free trade when he ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party, but more powerful interests came to prevail:

The impetus came from corporate headquarters, mostly American, as conveyed through the Reagan administration. We were guinea pigs, as Mulroney went along enthusiastically. What’s strange is that we remain, almost alone, fervent free traders while most others, including the U.S., got off that train a while ago. 

Linda McQuaig has a similarly negative view of Mulroney's legacy, which compromised our values as a nation:

... Canada had a different (vis a vis the U.S.) political tradition, with government playing an important role advancing the public interest through crown corporations and universal social programs.

Canadian business leaders wanted that changed, even though they understood that most Canadians didn’t. In a paper released just before the 1984 election, the CEOs who made up the Business Council on National Issues acknowledged that Canada’s higher social spending reflected “the greater priority that Canadians put on social welfare.”

Canadians would just have to learn to make their social well-being less of a priority, the CEOs had decided.

They had the perfect stooge in Mulroney, the lover of all things American. 

.. Mulroney largely delivered for the business world, introducing far-reaching changes that transformed the Canadian political and economic landscape, partly through his free trade deal with the U.S. that weakened labour and enhanced the rights of business and investors.

Earlier Canadian governments had developed more than 60 crown corporations. Mulroney privatized or began privatizing some key ones, including a national railway, oil company and airline, and completed the privatization of Connaught Labs, a publicly-owned biomedical company that had become one of the world’s leading vaccine producers. 

Canada’s corporate world has thrived in recent decades, which explains much of the elite adulation for Brian Mulroney since his death last month. But the world he ushered in has left many Canadians feeling like the workers he left behind in the snowbanks.

In Death of A Salesman, protagonist Willy Loman preached the cult of personality, believing until almost the end that the man who is well-liked has the world as his oyster. I doubt that Brian Mulroney ever came to understand otherwise.