In the 21st century, corporate bosses aren't opposed to journalists making a fortune -- as long as they make it for someone else.

So while the Toronto Globe and Mail struggles with technological and social changes that have driven its business model toward obsolescence, it is also launching an attack on its unionized journalistic workforce under the cover of Internet-caused hard times.

We won the lottery. Now we won't stop telling everyone else how to run their financial affairs. And guess what? They don't like it!

I've always suspected this was the way Canadians were reacting to Albertans. Now we know it was already true way back in 2008, thanks to a public opinion survey of Toronto and Vancouver residents conducted for the Alberta government that year and reported yesterday by the Canadian Press.

Media mavens and politicians around the globe are surely watching with fascination the groundbreaking approach to managing news coverage now being pioneered by the mayor of Canada's largest city.

We speak, of course, of the gambit by Toronto's slapstick neo-Con mayor, Rob Ford, to refuse public documents to the Toronto Star, thus depriving the country's historically most-aggressive daily newspaper of such important scoops as canned complaints by city officials about Occupy Toronto and a vital report on progress repairing potholes.

Great newspapers support great causes and Canada is a great cause.

The news coverage of the New Democratic surge noted in a poll early today by Angus Reid reads like a bad joke.

"NDP moves into tie with Liberals: Poll," said a headline in the Toronto Star, sensibly enough. However, the reporter led the story as follows: "The New Democrats begin the fourth week of the campaign tied with the Liberals for second place, but their support could collapse by the time voters go to the polls, according to a new survey." (Emphasis added.)

Here's the bad joke this reminds me of:

The Toronto Star has picked up Rick Salutin's weekly column and his first column was published last week. Salutin's column will run in The Star on Fridays.

Salutin was a long-time columnist for The Globe and Mail until Globe management ceased to publish his progressive, award-winning column when the newspaper was redesigned last fall. Salutin's Globe column was also syndicated on rabble.ca.

C'mon, people! The complaints provided the excuse.

Scrapping the mandatory long-form census questionnaire never had anything to do with Canadians' wishes, fears or concerns.

If that wasn't clear before, it should be obvious now that the Toronto Star has revealed Prime Minister Stephen Harper's so-called Conservative government made the decision to scrap the long-form census on the basis of fewer than 100 complaints from Canadians.

Speaking here as someone who has endured a dozen or so years of hard labour in the Cowtown media, Calgary's worst literary enemies are not "smarmy twerps" from the eastern press. They are the paranoid and belligerent twerps in the Calgary media.

Let me explain.