If I remember correctly, Reg Cohn at the Toronto Star was one of the first mainstream journos to take up the cause, long promulgated by the ultra right-wing Fraser Institute, to deregulate beer and liquor sales in Ontario.
It's a well financed lobbying campaign that hits all the right buttons.
Don't consumers deserve more choice?
Shouldn't the public have more options about where they buy their booze?
Won't private-sector efficiencies reduce the cost of this critical commodity?
Well, no...
Hell no!
I'll tell you right off the top that I have been for decades a very good customer of both the Beer Store and the LCBO monopolies. In fact, in one of my divorce proceedings the other side made an attempt to portray me as an alcoholic, if one can even imagine such a thing!
Truth be told, I've never suffered significant inconvenience by having to visit an actual Beer Store or LCBO to buy my medicine.
Sure, it would be easier to wobble down the street to pick up a six-pack at the local Mac's, but what the hell... could there be more at play here than my convenience?
The imaginary outrage against the Beer Store/LCBO combine is lavishly financed by the convenience store lobby, which is in turn lavishly financed by Alimentation Couche-Tard, which is a great Canadian success story, being today the largest convenience store chain on the planet.
Employees at Couche-Tard stores tend to earn minimum wage.
Employees at the Beer Store and the LCBO make more than that.
I'm more than willing to patronize a semi-monopoly if it means the folks working there will continue to make a decent wage. Saving a dollar or two on a bottle of wine or a case of beer while throwing thousands of Beer Store and LCBO workers into min wage penury doesn't strike me as a bargain.
How sad that both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail have climbed aboard this bandwagon.
Showing posts with label Fraser Institute. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fraser Institute. Show all posts
Friday, January 23, 2015
Sunday, August 17, 2014
News as drivel or drivel as news?
Here's a story that's gotten traction across Canadian media platforms for a couple of days now.
This particular iteration of the story is titled "Sask economist criticizes report on taxes v necessity spending".
The gist of the "story", although you'd never know it from this example, is that Canadians pay more in tax than they do for the necessities of life like food and shelter.
I've read the Fraser Institute report that this story is based on. They managed to come up with their alarmist conclusion by counting taxes and royalties paid by oil companies as taxes paid by consumers. They justify this sleight of hand by claiming, correctly, that oil companies pass their expenses, including taxes, on to the consumer.
Every company in the world passes all their expenses on to the consumer, but calling those costs "tax" charged to the consumer is a novelty I've never seen before.
That's probably the only newsworthy thing about this Fraser Institute report.
Nevertheless, news editors across the land decided they had a "story" here.
The Saskatoon/CTV version of this "news story" is particularly lame for several reasons.
This particular iteration of the story is titled "Sask economist criticizes report on taxes v necessity spending".
The gist of the "story", although you'd never know it from this example, is that Canadians pay more in tax than they do for the necessities of life like food and shelter.
I've read the Fraser Institute report that this story is based on. They managed to come up with their alarmist conclusion by counting taxes and royalties paid by oil companies as taxes paid by consumers. They justify this sleight of hand by claiming, correctly, that oil companies pass their expenses, including taxes, on to the consumer.
Every company in the world passes all their expenses on to the consumer, but calling those costs "tax" charged to the consumer is a novelty I've never seen before.
That's probably the only newsworthy thing about this Fraser Institute report.
Nevertheless, news editors across the land decided they had a "story" here.
The Saskatoon/CTV version of this "news story" is particularly lame for several reasons.
- It tells you economist Erin Weir objects to the story, but doesn't tell you why, other than 1961 was a bad year for a baseline. Why was 1961 a bad year for a baseline?
- It identifies Erin Weir as an economist, but not as an economist employed by a major labour union.
- It tells us that the study came from the Fraser Institute, which it identifies as a "think-tank", which is true as far as it goes. The Fraser Institute is a far-right think tank that hates all taxes and is rabidly anti-labour.
So while we have the potential for a meaningful debate between a labour economist and an anti-labour "think-tank", instead we get nothing.
That's just shabby journalism.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Marx, Engels... Forbes?
I know!
There's a disconnect in that title. But take a read of this slam of uber-corp General Electric.
Turns out "Generous Electric" is one of the most polished practitioners in the art of looting employee pensions.
Here in Canada none other than Conrad Black was one of the pioneers of the practice when he went after the pension "surplus" of the Dominion Store cashiers and shelf-stockers back in the day.
Unfortunately, practices that were once seen as egregious violations of the social contract, if left unchallenged, eventually give rise to a revised social contract.
Which is how Canada's most liberal newspaper today came to publish an article called "Bankable sick days a perk past its prime."
They were not, regrettably, being ironic.
Canada's most liberal newspaper references both the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in a "news" article that argues vehemently that "perks" like defined benefit pensions and bankable sick days are relics of an era when unions had too much clout.
Thanks to the last thirty years of Reaganomics, bankable sick days and defined benefit pension plans are now almost exclusively the purview of unionized public sector workers.
That's because the private sector workers have been squeezed out of their unions and their benefits by the ever-present and all-too-real threat of having their jobs offshored.
As you may have noticed, most public sector workers are immune to that threat. You can't really hire out the township snow-plowing to China or Mexico. Or your teaching or policing.
But you can demand that they reduce their expectations to the emaciated level of the utterly gutted private sector.
And what a shameful spectacle it is to see Canada's most liberal newspaper leading this charge.
There's a disconnect in that title. But take a read of this slam of uber-corp General Electric.
Turns out "Generous Electric" is one of the most polished practitioners in the art of looting employee pensions.
Here in Canada none other than Conrad Black was one of the pioneers of the practice when he went after the pension "surplus" of the Dominion Store cashiers and shelf-stockers back in the day.
Unfortunately, practices that were once seen as egregious violations of the social contract, if left unchallenged, eventually give rise to a revised social contract.
Which is how Canada's most liberal newspaper today came to publish an article called "Bankable sick days a perk past its prime."
They were not, regrettably, being ironic.
Canada's most liberal newspaper references both the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in a "news" article that argues vehemently that "perks" like defined benefit pensions and bankable sick days are relics of an era when unions had too much clout.
Thanks to the last thirty years of Reaganomics, bankable sick days and defined benefit pension plans are now almost exclusively the purview of unionized public sector workers.
That's because the private sector workers have been squeezed out of their unions and their benefits by the ever-present and all-too-real threat of having their jobs offshored.
As you may have noticed, most public sector workers are immune to that threat. You can't really hire out the township snow-plowing to China or Mexico. Or your teaching or policing.
But you can demand that they reduce their expectations to the emaciated level of the utterly gutted private sector.
And what a shameful spectacle it is to see Canada's most liberal newspaper leading this charge.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
What the Temporary Foreign Worker scam says about Canada's education system
In the first place, it says Canada's education system isn't graduating students that Canadian employers want to hire.
While viewed in isolation that statement may be true, my common cause with Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe types pretty much ends there.
While Canadian high school students consistently score well on international tests, few outside the education establishment are aware that huge swaths of students, those streamed into "basic" or "essential" or "locally developed" programs, never participate in the tests.
Those students are the victims of the self-esteem obsession that has guided Canadian education for the past thirty years or so.
The kids who come from backgrounds that are more affluent, more educated, more motivated, have the resources available to overcome this self-esteem obsession.
They have books in the house and parents who encourage them to read.
The kids who don't have that, have a system that tells them reading is redundant, that "viewing is reading," and that their feelings are paramount.
As long as those kids feel good about themselves, everything is hunky-dory.
So after ten or fifteen years being told how great they are, these students graduate into a world where they quickly discover that feeling good about themselves doesn't translate into employable skills.
Canada graduates huge numbers of youths who are functionally illiterate and struggle to do math at a grade two level.
But they feel really good about themselves, at least until they realize how unemployable they are.
Then they are stymied, because that other pillar of the Canadian system, having critical thinking skills, turns out to be as ephemeral as their self-esteem.
There are tens of thousands of unemployed youths in Alberta, the province that needs to import tens of thousands of Temporary Foreign Workers to man the counter at the local Tim Hortons.
If Alberta youth had the slightest grasp of what "critical thinking" means they would be organizing, demonstrating, and raising hell...
At least if all that "critical thinking" bullshit in the mission statements and curriculum overviews of their high schools was anything other than jargon designed to hide the fact that the system is failing them.
If "critical thinking" were a bona fide part of their education, they'd be picketing and boycotting those fast food joints until the wages offered could provide an acceptable Canadian standard of living.
While viewed in isolation that statement may be true, my common cause with Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe types pretty much ends there.
While Canadian high school students consistently score well on international tests, few outside the education establishment are aware that huge swaths of students, those streamed into "basic" or "essential" or "locally developed" programs, never participate in the tests.
Those students are the victims of the self-esteem obsession that has guided Canadian education for the past thirty years or so.
The kids who come from backgrounds that are more affluent, more educated, more motivated, have the resources available to overcome this self-esteem obsession.
They have books in the house and parents who encourage them to read.
The kids who don't have that, have a system that tells them reading is redundant, that "viewing is reading," and that their feelings are paramount.
As long as those kids feel good about themselves, everything is hunky-dory.
So after ten or fifteen years being told how great they are, these students graduate into a world where they quickly discover that feeling good about themselves doesn't translate into employable skills.
Canada graduates huge numbers of youths who are functionally illiterate and struggle to do math at a grade two level.
But they feel really good about themselves, at least until they realize how unemployable they are.
Then they are stymied, because that other pillar of the Canadian system, having critical thinking skills, turns out to be as ephemeral as their self-esteem.
There are tens of thousands of unemployed youths in Alberta, the province that needs to import tens of thousands of Temporary Foreign Workers to man the counter at the local Tim Hortons.
If Alberta youth had the slightest grasp of what "critical thinking" means they would be organizing, demonstrating, and raising hell...
At least if all that "critical thinking" bullshit in the mission statements and curriculum overviews of their high schools was anything other than jargon designed to hide the fact that the system is failing them.
If "critical thinking" were a bona fide part of their education, they'd be picketing and boycotting those fast food joints until the wages offered could provide an acceptable Canadian standard of living.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Fraser Institute proves lazy public servants vastly overpaid
Yes, it must be true.
Public sector workers are raking in an unbelievable 14% more on average than their counterparts in the private sector.
In fact, it's even worse than the right-wing egg-heads at the Fraser Institute imagine. Mall cops work for minimum wage. Real cops average six numbers.
That's not a 14% difference. It's about a 500% difference.
But that's not something the Fraser Institute posse will focus on, because they're not after $120,000/yr folks in the RCMP.
They're after clerical workers and mid-level managers and bus-drivers and trash collectors. These are the folks who make 14% more in the public service than in the private sector.
And that's what's driving us down the road to ruin.
Overpaid garbage collectors.
Can you imagine garbage collectors making twenty dollars an hour? And having PENSIONS to boot? Well, maybe you can't, but the Fraser Institute certainly can. In fact, they can find plenty of garbage collectors making 30 or 40 dollars an hour.
And the Fraser Institute is well aware that there are lots of starving unemployed folks willing to take a crack at that job for minimum wage.
Which proves to the good folks at the Fraser Institute that minimum wages are way too high.
"A free and prosperous world through choice, markets, and responsibility" is their motto.
Your free choice to work for nothing will be a vote of confidence in the markets your friends at the Fraser Institute champion...
Public sector workers are raking in an unbelievable 14% more on average than their counterparts in the private sector.
In fact, it's even worse than the right-wing egg-heads at the Fraser Institute imagine. Mall cops work for minimum wage. Real cops average six numbers.
That's not a 14% difference. It's about a 500% difference.
But that's not something the Fraser Institute posse will focus on, because they're not after $120,000/yr folks in the RCMP.
They're after clerical workers and mid-level managers and bus-drivers and trash collectors. These are the folks who make 14% more in the public service than in the private sector.
And that's what's driving us down the road to ruin.
Overpaid garbage collectors.
Can you imagine garbage collectors making twenty dollars an hour? And having PENSIONS to boot? Well, maybe you can't, but the Fraser Institute certainly can. In fact, they can find plenty of garbage collectors making 30 or 40 dollars an hour.
And the Fraser Institute is well aware that there are lots of starving unemployed folks willing to take a crack at that job for minimum wage.
Which proves to the good folks at the Fraser Institute that minimum wages are way too high.
"A free and prosperous world through choice, markets, and responsibility" is their motto.
Your free choice to work for nothing will be a vote of confidence in the markets your friends at the Fraser Institute champion...
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
New research upsets anti-union apple-cart
Professor Erwin Diewert of UBC is uncorking a research paper that upends the last fifty years of received wisdom on the subject of Canada's supposed "productivity gap" with the US.
There is not a business school or an editorial board in Canada that has not laboured long and hard to explain that gap, and without fail there are several common threads in those explanations.
There is not a business school or an editorial board in Canada that has not laboured long and hard to explain that gap, and without fail there are several common threads in those explanations.
- Canadian taxes are too high
- labour laws are too rigid
- the minimum wage is too high
- unions have too much clout
- all of the above conspire to drive the best and the brightest to greener pastures
So after hearing that same song from every think tank in the land for the better part of half a century, Professor Diewert comes along and claims that the "productivity gap" as we have come to know and fear it simply doesn't exist!
Taxes aren't too high after all.
Labour laws could stand to be tightened up a little.
The minimum wage could be higher.
Unions don't have enough clout.
Insofar as the "best and brightest" have sought out greener pastures, it's because of fear-mongering and not because of facts!
Thanks Professor Diewert!..
LET'S PARTY LIKE IT'S 1962!!!
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
The blissful certainties of a black-and-white world
Gwyn Morgan, according to the brief bio beneath his byline in the Globe and Mail, is "a Canadian business leader and a director of two global corporations".
Yesterday Morgan's astute analysis cut straight to the heart of the global economic crisis. The world is divided into two camps. On the one side you have the "givers". These would be your hard-working right-voting folks; entrepreneurs and wealth creators.
On the other side is your left-tilting grab-bag of liberals, Democrats, socialists of all stripes, welfare cheats, drug addicts, the sick, the halt, the lame, the weak of back and slow of mind, et. cetra. These are of course the "takers".
Quoting reverently from Glenn Beck's idol Friedrich Hayek, Morgan warns the reader that the long-suffering "givers" are on the verge of giving up. It's clear to Morgan that the insatiable demands of the "takers" are threatening the very future of the free enterprise model, which history has irrefutably proven to be superior. He cites two vastly over-simplified examples.
Look at Germany when the wall went down. Free-enterprisers on the one side. A socialist wasteland on the other. Germany was able to absorb those Eastern slackers and become the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe, but now all these "takers" in Greece and Spain threaten to break the back of the German miracle.
He finds an example in Canada as well. Look at those student protesters in Quebec. Talk about thankless "takers"! The lowest tuition in the land and yet they march for lower tuition?
And the "givers" in his Canadian scenario are the tax-payers of Alberta, who work tirelessly digging their self-created oil wealth out of the ground so that they can provide the "lions share" of the 7 billion in equalization payments that the rest of us bestow on Quebec every year.
But no economic analysis by this Fraser Institute regular is complete without a gratuitous slap at the NDP, the former socialist party with aspirations to form a government in the event that Canadians ever wake up and smell the Harper.
So Morgan has got the pro-labour NDP leader Thomas Mulcair marching to the barricades with the Montreal students. There they go, students and unionists arm in arm, rallying to "replace free-market capitalism with government controlled socialism".
The final triumph of the "takers" over the "givers".
Then it struck me that both the students and the NDP leader would be more than comfortable in Germany!
No tuition!
Government mandated union representation on corporate boards!
And suddenly I realized that it's not such a black-and-white world after all. Maybe there are other options besides "free-market capitalism" and "government mandated socialism".
Maybe a government regulated capitalism?
Perhaps we should embrace the German model, Mr. Morgan!
But his economic analyses aren't all that's dodgy about Gwyn Morgan.
In the course of his business career Morgan built Encana into North America's second largest natural gas company, leaving a trail of despoiled communities all over the continent as a result of his wholesale embrace of industrial-scale fracking practices.
Since leaving Encana he has become Chairman of the Board of SNC-Lavalin, the Canadian conglomerate currently under a cloud of suspicion over corruption in Bangladesh, Mexico, Libya and Switzerland.
And here's the punch line; he's on the speakers circuit these days, giving lectures around the world on the topic of business ethics!
Yesterday Morgan's astute analysis cut straight to the heart of the global economic crisis. The world is divided into two camps. On the one side you have the "givers". These would be your hard-working right-voting folks; entrepreneurs and wealth creators.
On the other side is your left-tilting grab-bag of liberals, Democrats, socialists of all stripes, welfare cheats, drug addicts, the sick, the halt, the lame, the weak of back and slow of mind, et. cetra. These are of course the "takers".
Quoting reverently from Glenn Beck's idol Friedrich Hayek, Morgan warns the reader that the long-suffering "givers" are on the verge of giving up. It's clear to Morgan that the insatiable demands of the "takers" are threatening the very future of the free enterprise model, which history has irrefutably proven to be superior. He cites two vastly over-simplified examples.
Look at Germany when the wall went down. Free-enterprisers on the one side. A socialist wasteland on the other. Germany was able to absorb those Eastern slackers and become the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe, but now all these "takers" in Greece and Spain threaten to break the back of the German miracle.
He finds an example in Canada as well. Look at those student protesters in Quebec. Talk about thankless "takers"! The lowest tuition in the land and yet they march for lower tuition?
And the "givers" in his Canadian scenario are the tax-payers of Alberta, who work tirelessly digging their self-created oil wealth out of the ground so that they can provide the "lions share" of the 7 billion in equalization payments that the rest of us bestow on Quebec every year.
But no economic analysis by this Fraser Institute regular is complete without a gratuitous slap at the NDP, the former socialist party with aspirations to form a government in the event that Canadians ever wake up and smell the Harper.
So Morgan has got the pro-labour NDP leader Thomas Mulcair marching to the barricades with the Montreal students. There they go, students and unionists arm in arm, rallying to "replace free-market capitalism with government controlled socialism".
The final triumph of the "takers" over the "givers".
Then it struck me that both the students and the NDP leader would be more than comfortable in Germany!
No tuition!
Government mandated union representation on corporate boards!
And suddenly I realized that it's not such a black-and-white world after all. Maybe there are other options besides "free-market capitalism" and "government mandated socialism".
Maybe a government regulated capitalism?
Perhaps we should embrace the German model, Mr. Morgan!
But his economic analyses aren't all that's dodgy about Gwyn Morgan.
In the course of his business career Morgan built Encana into North America's second largest natural gas company, leaving a trail of despoiled communities all over the continent as a result of his wholesale embrace of industrial-scale fracking practices.
Since leaving Encana he has become Chairman of the Board of SNC-Lavalin, the Canadian conglomerate currently under a cloud of suspicion over corruption in Bangladesh, Mexico, Libya and Switzerland.
And here's the punch line; he's on the speakers circuit these days, giving lectures around the world on the topic of business ethics!
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