A bit of Javascript to expose permalinks in Canvas' discussions and announcements (works in -- at least -- Chrome and Safari). Current updates to this are taking place in this fork of our main repo: https://github.com/smtech/canvas/tree/dev-discussion-permalinks

discussion-permalinks.js

/* Canvas loads discussion entries using AJAX, so we have to wait a moment
   for the entries to actually be, y'know... _there_. */
var delay = 1000; // 1 second = 1000 milliseconds

function addPermalinks() {
	/* make sure that we are actually messing with a discussion page... */
	if (document.getElementById('discussion_container')) {
		/* run through all of the <li> elements looking for entry IDs */
		var entries = document.getElementById('discussion_subentries').childNodes[0].getElementsByTagName('li');
		for (var i = 0; i < entries.length; ++i) {
			var id = entries[i].getAttribute('id');
			/* if we find an entry id, slap the permalink after the post date (why
			   the post date? because it's easy to find and at the top of the entry) */
			if (id !== null && id.substring(0, 6) === 'entry-') {
				var pubdate = entries[i].getElementsByTagName('time')[0];
				permalink = pubdate.innerHTML + ' &bull; <a target="_top" href="#' + id + '">permalink</a>';
				pubdate.innerHTML = permalink;
			}
		}
	}
}

window.setTimeout(addPermalinks, delay);