Don Drummond confesses that he has been wrong to believe that changes in public policies -- such as free trade, cuts to corporate taxes, low inflation, the introduction of the GST, balanced budgets and reductions to inter-provincial trade barriers (a.k.a. the neo-liberal agenda) -- are the key to improving Canada's dismal productivity record.

The campaign to save the HST is rather shameless, not to mention bad public policy. We won't, as HST spin masters would have it, pay less tax with the new and improved HST. The amount of tax we collectively pay depends on the amount of services and support government provides - total government spending- not the manner in which taxes are paid.

True, different types of taxes affect people differently and the fairness of different tax policies is a valid concern. But don't tell me we are going to pay less overall by instituting one tax as opposed another. It is a silly reason to support of the HST in the same way that it was a silly reason to support the ‘revenue-negative' carbon tax.

Kim Campbell, once prime minister of Canada for five minutes, got herself pilloried by all right-thinking hypocrites for revealing the dirty secret of democratic politics everywhere: Election campaigns are no time for issues to be seriously discussed. Yet even she didn't have it exactly right. It's really worse than that. In Canadian politics these days, no time is a good time for thoroughly and vigorously debating the daunting critical issues that confront this country.

I must admit, I don't spend too much time reading comments posted to news stories. Beneath a cowardly shroud of anonymity, too many spew venom and hate and extraordinary ignorance. But there are times when I will scan a few pages worth of comments, hoping for an illuminating and pithy remark, a wonderfully unique approach to an idea, a few sentences that challenge me, a laugh. Most of the time I'm disappointed and eventually bored.

There are those who blow in bellowing and bloviating, without a scintilla of critical thinking or reading comprehension. Those who troll around for any opportunity to trumpet their confirmation biases.

Rampant poverty can’t be written off as the result of historical accident or a worker’s incompetence. It is actively cultivated by bad public policies that direct economic resources into the hands of a wealthy few. The resulting inequality creates unnecessary suffering all over the world, from the humanitarian crisis in Haiti to the alarmingly high poverty rate in the United States.

Systemic poverty in Haiti

The tragedy in Haiti is not only the result of a massive earthquake. As Richard Kim explains for The Nation, Haiti has long been one of the world’s poorest nations, and that poverty has prevented the country from protecting itself against natural disasters. As Kim explains:

In the 2009 Eve Saville lecture delivered this past July, Professor David Nutt of Imperial College London, also the chairman of the UK government's Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, made some claims that few of us would contentious: