Friday Afternoon Links

To help pass the time until the event apparently taking place at midnight.

- Aaron Wherry's year-end column is well worth a read in general. But it's particularly worth highlighting this piece:

(F)rom the far end of the room, often this year there was Mr. Harris and his gruff Newfoundland brogue (or perhaps it’s more of a twang). Here sometimes seemed a man who would set his teeth into your pant leg and not let go. That he and (the NDP) refused to go along with the negotiated agreement that followed the Speaker’s ruling and that they now pursue the participants from the outside is perhaps the only reason to believe the process will come to anything. Surely, if only to avoid proving them right, the Liberals and Bloc will be compelled to carry out their duties. Such is democracy. Or so we can hope.

Not that there's been much reason for optimism yet, mind you...

- LRT has some ideas on how an effort to offer big political choices rather than the usual microtargeted minutiae could result in much-needed change.

- Kelly McParland nicely illustrates why it's a sucker's bet for a self-identified progressive party to go out of its way to try to please the corporate sector. After a year where the McGuinty government gave business billions in free money by both slashing corporate tax rates and implementing the HST which exempts it from paying consumption taxes, it's treated to this from somebody who would seemingly agree entirely with its direction:

(W)e would settle for an incremental change: If Mr. McGuinty merely ceased forcing the province's corporations to pay for his grandiose ideas, Ontario might once again attract the investment it needs to be the engine of our economic growth.

- And finally, now's the time to get in one last donation in 2010.