Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted reading material for your weekend.

- Alice has all the background you could need to the much-discussed bill on seat redistribution.

- Apparently it's time for a reminder which party to the contracts surrounding the G20 is actually in charge of running the country:

Anne White, Deerhurst communications director, says it is against company policy to make public how much the resort was paid by the federal government to run the central venue for the G8 meeting.

Which, last I checked, wouldn't seem to trump the law of the land. But I suppose we can never rule out the possibility that the Access to Information Act passed by Parliament setting out a right to information about how Canada's government works has quietly been made subordinate to corporate policy.

- Thomas Walkom follows up on Kevin Page's report showing that the Cons' stimulus didn't actually do anything much to create jobs:

u(U)employment remains persistently high. Even Friday’s announcement that the official jobless rate fell to 7.6 per cent must be seen in the context of a labour market where thousands have simply given up looking for work.

So perhaps the economists — and the government — should pay more attention to Page on this. Granted, those he interviewed may not have taken into account the spin-offs from stimulus spending (as, for instance, when a construction worker laying sewer-pipe buys a submarine sandwich).

Granted also that recipients of federal cash may not have considered the jobs that stimulus spending saved from being lost.

But if one-fifth of those at the sharp end found that the government money they spent reduced employment in their communities, alarm bells should ring.

- Finally, Scott Feschuk's compilation of Julian Fantino's childhood correspondence nicely skewers his post-election diatribe.