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.

According to the publisher of Canada's National Toronto Newspaper, the Globe and Mail will now try to make its readers to pay to read its on-line content -- a trend established by the New York Times last year with limited success.

Phillip Crawley told his assembled troops on Thursday that the paper "will implement a metered paywall system this fall, asking readers to pay if they read more than a certain number of articles each month."

Does it really surprise anyone that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is preparing an attack on ordinary Canadians' retirement security when even the advice of the government's own experts affirms there's no evidence such change is required?

Does it really surprise anyone that's he's doing it now, just when he'd persuaded us he was a really fine, avuncular, sweater-wearing fellow, possibly holding a pussy cat, who said absolutely nothing about this topic during his recent election campaign?

Seriously, people, this is the neo-Con modus operandi -- when the opportunity presents itself, manufacture a "crisis" and move swiftly to "resolve" it while the opposition is still silently bug-eyed with astonishment and trying to remember where the facts were filed.

All of a sudden the federal election campaign is a horserace, just not the horserace we anticipated when it began.

Can you imagine an election result that shows the Conservatives still in a minority, but NDP Leader Jack Layton as the leader of the Opposition with his party holding 83 seats in Parliament? A fresh projection by poll-analyst and frequent Globe and Mail contributor Eric Grenier shows that this is possible.

But for this to be more than just a democratic pipedream, one thing above all must happen: the NDP must ensure that its supporters -- every single one of them -- gets out and votes, and votes NDP, on election day.

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.

All across Canada yesterday afternoon, journalists were filing cheerful little stories about the latest results from the Newspaper Audience Databank and how they provide heartening news for the local rag and, indeed, the entire newspaper industry.

After NADBank yesterday privately released its 2009-2010 readership results to the newspapers in the communities surveyed, the resulting story in the Edmonton Journal was headlined "Readership numbers good news for The Journal."

Who canned Rick Salutin? And why?

For heaven's sake, this mystery is already shrouded in almost as much speculation as the disappearance of Judge Crater!