Saturday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- Trish Hennessy points out that Rob Ford's contemptuous attack on the idea of secure employment may offer an ideal contrast between the right-wing view of the economy and the stability citizens actually want for themselves:

Remember when holding down a job for life was considered a sign of personal responsibility and integrity?

Remember when staying committed to a job for life was an example of how you could be relied upon, trusted? How you were viewed as stable and productive?

Remember when having a job for life was a symbol of the model citizen? A good family person? A way to contribute to our collective well-being?

And remember when the pot of gold at the end of that job-for-life rainbow was a company pension that turned retirement into “the golden years”?

A job for life. A frame worth propagating?

- Meanwhile, Karen Foster points out the disturbingly high number of workers stuck with "involuntary" part-time work due to a lack of full-time jobs.

- Rick Salutin discusses how readily-available online communications can serve as a democratizing force:

The models for major change over the past two centuries were Revolution versus Reform. Either overthrow and destroy what was in place — the ancien regime, capitalism etc. — replacing them with something new. Or reform those institutions, nibbling away at them till you’ve gradually reconstructed them. You see the mindset persisting in education: either get rid of schools as they are and replace them with free schools, home schooling and the like — or reform what’s there until it vanishes.

But tweet night did neither. It left all the appalling old structures exactly as they were: the podium, the stodgy agenda (presentation followed by Q and A). Yet it remade them simply by inserting a layer: the Internet. Nothing changed but everything was different due to that insertion. It’s radical, in the sense of transformative, yet conservative, in the sense of preservative. And it worked.

- Jorge Barrera breaks the story that the Cons tried to destroy records documenting their deliberate choice not to talk about John Duncan's callous view of residential schools.

- Finally, Erin points out that the Wall government seems to be curiously silent about BHP Billiton's plans to undermine Canpotex now that there aren't obvious political points to be scored.