There has never been a shortage of plagiarism in Canadian letters.

The sins of the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente are literally nothing new, and hardly unique, although the highly entertaining social media furor about them may be.

Indeed, I feel just the tiniest bit of sympathy for Wente -- who in the interests of full disclosure I must acknowledge briefly supervised some of my work at the Globe and Mail back in the 1980s. This is why I know about Conrad Black getting his driver to deliver his columns to her in the comfort of the company limousine.

It takes more than a little brass for retired Calgary Herald editor and columnist Catherine Ford to condemn Conservative candidate Joan Crockatt as someone who all but caused the strike at that newspaper in 1999.

In a Globe and Mail article last week that characterized the recently nominated Conservative standard-bearer in the upcoming Calgary-Centre by-election as a "polarizing candidate" -- as a case can be made she is -- Ford was quoted assailing Crockatt as "one of the main reasons workers went on a union drive in 1999 and ended up in long strike (sic)."

Welcome to the world of zombie newspapers, the era of the living journalistic dead.

Last week it was the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the venerable Louisiana newspaper with the best name in English-language journalism, which announced it would only publish three days a week and send most of its staff packing.

Tory times, as the old saying goes, are terrible times. So it should surprise no one that as we mark the first anniversary of Stephen Harper's majority victory today, the country is increasingly polarized, students are in the streets of Quebec where separatism is again rearing its head, and mean-spirited pink slips are being handed out right and left to public employees accompanied by the pitiless rah-rahs of the Online Tory Rage Machine, parts of which apparently operate out of the United States.