Does it really surprise anyone that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is preparing an attack on ordinary Canadians' retirement security when even the advice of the government's own experts affirms there's no evidence such change is required?

Does it really surprise anyone that's he's doing it now, just when he'd persuaded us he was a really fine, avuncular, sweater-wearing fellow, possibly holding a pussy cat, who said absolutely nothing about this topic during his recent election campaign?

Seriously, people, this is the neo-Con modus operandi -- when the opportunity presents itself, manufacture a "crisis" and move swiftly to "resolve" it while the opposition is still silently bug-eyed with astonishment and trying to remember where the facts were filed.

Further to Toby's post, the OECD report on inequality is well worth a careful read.

It bolsters, through careful empirical and cross-country analysis, two key arguments long advanced by the labour movement and progressive economists:

- Key trends in the labour market -- widening wage disparity between top earners and the rest, and the disproportionate growth of precarious jobs -- are the major driving force behind rising inequality of individual earnings which has in turn been a major force behind increased inequality of family incomes.

Following concern expressed by the IMF, the Conference Board and of course thousands of protesters around the world, the OECD has just released an extensive 400-page report on the problem of growing inequality: Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps on Rising.

The OECD's new assessment of the macro-economic situation makes for pretty grim reading. And their forecast of very sluggish global growth (just 1.6 per cent for the OECD area in 2012) is based on an increasingly incredible view that the Eurozone will "muddle through" and experience only a mild recession.

They do not seem to have convinced even themselves that this is really the most likely outcome.

It has been widely reported in the Globe and elsewhere that Canada ranks number 2 in the just-released OECD Better Life Index, outstripped only by Australia.

I am all for measures of objective and subjective social well-being that go beyond GDP as a measure of progress, and this OECD report offers up some useful information.

But providing grounds for national chest thumping is NOT the object of the OECD exercise.

Sylvia Ostry may be shocked, shocked, at Prime Minister Stephen Harper's drive to deprive Statistics Canada of its ability to conduct meaningful research, but no one who has been paying attention ought to be.