Saturday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- Lana Payne tears into the Cons for being interested solely in developing a junk labour market where both work safety and income security are sorely lacking. And Chris Selley offers his own rebuttal to the "no such thing as a bad job" mentality:

Mr. Flaherty’s sound byte might live longer than that, though. It certainly begs for inclusion in an NDP attack ad. If an Old Princetonian with a $235,000 public salary and a lavish pension is going to stand up and tell Canadians that “there is no bad job,” then at the very least he should probably have something a little grubbier on his CV to offer reporters than taxi-driving and hockey refereeing. I’ve led a fantastically comfortable and privileged life, and even I can trump taxi driver. There is most certainly such a thing as a bad job.

A bad job doesn’t have to be smelly, hot or noisy. Most people would define the term to include a job for which one is ludicrously overqualified, either on paper or in one’s heart: a plumber working security in the middle of the night, a carpenter slinging crullers, a cardiologist driving a taxi. It’s demoralizing and inherently wasteful, and this government says exactly that when it comes to immigrants. It quite rightly wants to ensure professionals don’t pack up and move to Canada only to toil miles below their station, and it quite rightly talks up the value of skilled trades. And yet here was Mr. Flaherty, whose big mouth seems to be enjoying majority governance, suggesting Canadians should be happy with any pay cheque they get.

- Dan Gardner neatly sums up the possible interpretations of the Cons' utter failure to match rhetoric with action on climate change:

(W)hat can we make of all this? There are two possibilities.

First, Stephen Harper and Company may be sincere about tackling climate change. In that case, they are grossly incompetent. Their policy is a mess. They have accomplished little or nothing. And there’s no reason to think they will do any better in the future.

The other possibility is that Stephen Harper and Company are lying. They do not have any intention of tackling climate change. They never did. Their only real goal is to manage the file so it doesn’t become a political liability, which they have done with considerable success.

And it surely isn't a positive sign that the Cons are yet again trotting out their all-too-familiar "next year" timeline for greenhouse gas emission regulations with a straight face.

- But of course, the Cons have been plenty busy with such important tasks as siccing the RCMP on anybody who reveals inconvenient truths, and trying to shut down any further discussion or investigation of their own electoral fraud.

 - And Carol Goar points out that the latest budget includes plenty more nasty surprises for Canadians. Which means there's plenty of reason why even previously loyal Con supporters have ample reason not to trust them.

[Edit: fixed formatting.]