Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- As would-be frackers show us exactly why it's dangerous to give the corporate sector a veto over government action, Steven Shrybman suggests that corporations are mostly doing only what we'd expect in exploiting agreements designed to prioritize profits over people:

Canadian businesses are simply playing by the rules of free trade which encourages the outsourcing of everthing that isn't glued to the local Tim Hortons or the tar sands (to cite two prominent examples): that means value-added processing (where the jobs are) of natural resources that are simply ripped and shipped to the US or Asia, virtually all manufacturing, and an awful lot of services -- from accounting, and computer programming, to retail (online) sales.

And yet, nary a mention of so-called free trade from Enright -- which is really no more than domestic market de-regulation and the principal cause of our present predicament.

- But then, it's not as if corporatist policy has emerged without some massive business lobbying - and Alison documents some of the connections between outsourcing firms and governments which have fed into the temporary foreign worker fiasco. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post points out some of the effects of temporary foreign worker abuse in Alberta, while the Canadian Media Guild notes that the Cons have made sure the floodgates are still wide open.

- Pogge writes that in limiting access to future project review proceedings, the Cons seem to have succeeded in taking the "public" out of public policy. But Robyn Benson confirms that the labour movement isn't about to be silenced.

- Jason Fekete offers a few early caveats as Statistics Canada gets set to release the results of the Cons' census vandalism.

- Finally, Paul Adams notes that after Jason Collins' decision to come out publicly was met with broad support, the North American conservative movement may be the last place where gays and lesbians are uniformly forced to stay in the closet. But I'm not sure we can expect that to change for the better when the likes of Brad Wall won't so much as deign to say the words "gay" or "homophobia" (while defending a choice not to support gay-straight alliances).