Monday Morning Links

A guided content tour to start your week.

- Perhaps the most striking part of Richard Brennan's story on Jason Kenney's attempts to control the content of "ethnic" media is that even he doesn't seem to dispute anything other than that there might be some carrots for supportive media to go with the sticks against anybody remotely critical:

Conservative Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney walked into The Korea Times office in January and admonished the publisher for being Liberal-friendly.

It suddenly made sense to Lawrence Kim why his staff at the daily newspaper was not given the chance to go with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to South Korea late last year while reporters from Korean weekly newspapers on the west coast got to go.

The message was clear — play ball with the Conservatives and there are rewards.

“We were not offered an opportunity (to go to Korea) ... he came and told me that they thought we are against the (Conservatives) and pro-Liberal but I told him that I am not pro or con,” said Kim, publisher of the Toronto daily.
...
Kenney’s office disagrees with The Korea Times’ account of what took place at that meeting, but acknowledges it has a problem with the paper’s coverage.

“Minister Kenney has had a long-standing concern with the biased, unfair coverage the government was receiving in The Korea Times,” wrote his spokesman, Alykhan Velshi.

Velshi said the minister went to the office for an editorial board meeting to simply express “our openness and good faith,” and added that Kenney wasn’t involved in deciding who was invited to the trip to Korea.

- I'm not sure if anybody can explain the news that the Cons will pour $100 million into the War of 1812 other than as an effort to goad the opposition into an election. But might this make for another couple of links to the Cons' Republican counterparts: both a desire to focus on military past at the expense of the present, and a refusal to accept that the South lost?

- Andrew Jackson counters the latest round of unfounded attacks on the civil service, while nicely highlighting how those fighting against the public sector are ultimately working to do nothing more than spread poor pay and working conditions to a broader range of workers:

While now somewhat dated, the best independent Canadian empirical studies show that a modest public sector pay advantage is mainly the product of higher pay for women in lower paid occupations, offset by lower pay for mainly male workers in managerial jobs.

The alleged ”public sector union elite” turns out not to be a bunch of overpaid archtypical bureaucrats, but to be modestly paid women such as caregivers who do much better than their private sector equivalents mainly because the latter struggle with low wages, are under-paid compared to equivalent male co workers, and rarely have access to pension and health benefits.
...
”A combination of factors explains government-private sector pay differences. Notable in this regard are pay equity policies, which narrow the male-female pay differentials in government, and the tendency for governments to pay more than the private sector does for service jobs and less than the private sector wage rates for managers. In other words, the spread between the top and the bottom of the pay scale is less in government than in the private sector, likely a result of political, public and collective bargaining pressures.”

These findings in turn help explain why the CFIB attacks public sector wages so fervently - they put upward pressure on them to pay more to under-paid women service workers.

- Finally, Inky Mark's criticisms of the Cons are well worth a read:

One must ask the question: What value is there having a membership in a party that doesn’t respects it’s membership? This lack of democracy at the local level is wrong. It has taken western society 700 years to take the power away from the crown and put it in the hands of the commoner. Today we have a system where the MP is appointed by the leader of the party, not the members of the party. Our young men and women are sacrificing their lives in the name of democracy around the world. Stephen Harper and Don Plett, instead of paying lip service to democracy, it s time to give the membership in Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette the right to an open and fair nomination.