Canada Post managers last year pocketed nearly $31 million in bonuses even as CEO Doug Ettinger told Parliament the organization was “on the brink.” The disclosures were detailed in financial accounts requested by MPs: “One of the things I lose sleep about is keeping the good people who are with us.”
Eleven percent bonuses for federal executives are proportionate and fair, says a memo to Treasury Board President Shafqat Ali. Bonuses averaging $18,316 per executive were paid last year even as cabinet told Canadians “these are tough times.”
Federal agents cannot keep up with deportation of foreign fugitives, according to figures in a Privy Council briefing note. Current targets are thousands short, data showed: “I liken our inventories to a bathtub; we are constantly scooping water out of that bathtub but the bathtub is filling up.”
Cabinet members and political aides received dozens of free passes to attend the FIFA World Cup including four staff and a summer student in the office of Liberal MP Adam van Koeverden (Burlington North-Milton West, Ont.), Secretary of State for Sport. The tournament cost taxpayers $1.07 billion: ‘Memories will last a generation.’
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne must “restore fiscal credibility,” say investment bankers. A Toronto think tank in a submission to MPs expressed alarm over high deficits: ‘There is no path to balance the budget.’
Long before,
The vacant promises of the elected.
Long before,
The vacant seats in the House.
Indians on foot greeted every lake, river and ridge.
If it’s off, turn back,
If the land feels wrong, it is.
The land watches.
Deracinated, society fractured and dulled.
Organizational structure,
Dictates outcome,
Mob rule by poll.
Respect the routes of the ancestors.
The land remembers and keeps the score.
The Big Water whispers its intent with each ripple.
Heed naught and suffer as fools.
Bureaucracies replicate,
And rush towards singularity,
Insularity results,
And the land waits.
But as the sun awakes in the East and surely rests in the West,
The absence of nature eats at man,
And the land remembers what the traveler has forgotten,
In the land that watches.
By W.N. Branson 
One day in 2004 two co-workers – one black, one white – had an unpleasant physical alteration at a slaughterhouse in Brooks, Alta. The black man was fired. About 200 Sudanese employees protested the wrongful dismissal. “Management told them, go back to your jobs or we’ll fire you,” one witness recalled. They refused. Sixty were fired.
The incident set in motion an extraordinary series of events documented in Defying Expectations by Professor Jason Foster of Athabasca University. Foster is a former policy director with the Alberta Federation of Labour, and a skillful writer whose account reads like a screenplay. The Brooks plant was the least promising candidate for a union drive anywhere in Canada.
There was no “eureka moment,” writes Foster. Local 401 of the United Food and Commercial Workers union was a “grocery store local” facing long odds in organizing industrial workers who didn’t speak English, in a province with an 11 percent private sector unionization rate, with an employer, Tyson Foods, so unfriendly to labour it posted a banner outside the Brooks plant that read, “Proudly Union-Free.”
“The Lakeside strike was no ordinary strike,” writes Foster. “The plant is located in Brooks, a sleepy southern Alberta town previously known for cattle and oil well servicing and deeply entrenched in Alberta’s conservative rural culture. The employer, Tyson Foods, was virulently anti-union and had fought hard for two decades to keep the plant union-free.”
Local 401 had no time for fine speeches and excellent PowerPoint presentations on long-term sectoral trends. “Perhaps they were too busy fighting immediate battles,” Foster explains. The president of Local 401 was Douglas O’Halloran, a combative former meatpacker. On gaining the presidency in 1989, he was handed elegant business cards identifying him as CEO of the local. “F–k that,” said O’Halloran. “Get me new cards.”
The UFCW tried for years to organize the Lakeside plant from 1992 and “almost annually after that” with failed membership drives in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002. “If the drive got to a vote the results were rarely close,” writes Foster. “The company waged aggressive counter-campaigns, using tactics that included threats and intimidation.”
The successful 2005 drive was gritty. Management ploughed makeshift roads through surrounding fields to bus replacement workers through a back gate. O’Halloran was injured in a high-speed chase with plant managers determined to serve him with Court papers. And African and Asian strikers had everything to lose. Many were refugees who’d slept in trailers outside the plant. “The immigrants had nowhere to go,” a union staffer recalled.
This tale of the Lakeside strike is riveting, too easily caricatured as black-and-white conflict in a small Prairie town with a fighting Irish union man and desperate immigrant jobseekers. It is much better than that.
“I can do anything for union because my soul is with them,” the author quotes one Lakeside worker, speaking in broken English. “I am closer with them than my family.”
By Holly Doan
Defying Expectations: The Case of UFCW Local 401, by Jason Foster; Athabasca University Press; 195 pages; ISBN 9781-7719-91995; $34.95
Condo speculators in Metro Vancouver caught with thousands of unsold units should be allowed to fail, says a Commons petition sponsored without comment by Conservative MP Dan Albas (Okanagan Lake West-South Kelowna, B.C.). Petitioners opposed a $1.45 billion bailout of developers at taxpayers’ expense: “Unsold units should be allowed to fall to prices that households can afford through open market discounts, credit or losses, or receivership.”
Military and civilian employees in the Department of National Defence have been cited for cheating on timesheets and fuel cards at taxpayers’ expense. No individuals were discharged though similar offences resulted in firings and police investigations in other departments: “We are constantly looking.”
Diplomats in staff emails depicted Fiji as a backwater where it was hard to find office supplies or make a long-distance phone call, Access To Information records show. Liberal MP Randeep Sarai (Surrey Centre, B.C.), Secretary of State for International Development, last January 16 opened Canada’s first Fijian mission in what cabinet called an important step in “Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy.”
A highway billboard calling the Prime Minister a liar was Charter-protected free expression, an Ontario Superior Court judge ruled yesterday. Counsel with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms that won the case called the decision “a welcome affirmation of the importance of political expression.”
The Atlantic Lottery Corporation of Moncton yesterday was fined $212,025 for breach of anti-money laundering regulations. The penalty is the latest in a series of violations by casino operators: “Very suspicious.”
Parks Canada in an internal report calls the creation of national parks culturally “harmful” and a “colonial injustice.” Management “now acknowledges this harmful historical legacy,” said the newly-disclosed report withheld from the public for two years.
Virgina Mearns, cabinet’s $181,000-a year Arctic Ambassador, has been cited for breach of the Conflict Of Interest Act and fined $400. MPs have long sought more serious penalties for violators: “There should be real consequences.”
Liberal campaign organizer Tom Pitfield’s Senate appointment was not patronage, Prime Minister Mark Carney said yesterday. The appointee had “deep technological knowledge” needed in the Senate, he said: “I am very pleased.”
