BINGO!

Further to this post, Thomas Walkom confirms what DJ! had speculated about, with regard to the sincerity of the Harper government's re-configuration of the MASSIVE Employment Insurance job training funds. 

The federal government says it is serious about job-training. It is not. 

If it were, it would not make it so easy for business to hire cheap workers from abroad. 

This is the dirty little secret about job-training in Canada. Employers don’t train workers because most don’t have to.[..] 

But employers know they don’t have to train. Instead, they need only wait until the last minute and then complain of labour shortages. 

Over the last decade, as my friends at the Globe and Mail have reported, the number of temporary workers admitted to Canada has more than tripled, from 101,000 to 338,000. 

This in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s. Business insists that such workers are needed because skilled Canadians are unavailable. 

But far too often the real reason is that foreign workers are willing to work for less. The Conservative government has codified this practice by permitting Canadian employers to pay their foreign workers up to 15 per cent less than the going wage. 

For anyone in need of inspiration to counter the Conservatives' odious union-busting tactics, follow what's happening in Toronto, on Twitter with this hashtag: #clcctc13 and of course, Vicky Smallman @vickyatclc and Rachel @rachelmack too!

A laborious work of non-fiction.

Reality is often more bizarre than fiction. If four years ago, a satirist had written a novel about the travails of a US right-wing political party and a turbulent election campaign that featured a political ‘marriage of convenience’ between an ersatz war hero and a ditzy moose-hunting governor, critics might have found it over the top.

Thus literary embellishment is applied to the gritty re-telling of 24 real-life stories of childbirth.

Zsuzsi Gartner reviews Great Expectations:

The cover belies the bloody, Gothic comedy of childbirth. An infant sleeps serenely, small spidery fingers curved to cheeks, efficiently wrapped in a cone of white blanket like a little amuse gueule - or a Communion wafer - ready to be plucked up and savoured. But inside Great Expectations there is blood aplenty (and copious other fluids, including tears), thundering pain, death and near-death experiences. The final month of pregnancy is Waiting for Godot, then suddenly the curtain rises on Act IV, Scene III of Macbeth. Editors Dede Crane and Lisa Moore have assembled a hot pot of two dozen Canadian fiction writers and journalists, women and men, to reflect on the childbirth experience from the trenches.

Trench?!? Ha! That’s a new one, I’ve never heard the

va-jay-jay called that.