The Senate ethics committee recommends Senator Lynn Beyak be suspended again for talking back in sensitivity training class. Beyak was awarded an Indigenous Awareness certificate but remained a poor student, said an instructor: ‘I want to move forward and not be stuck in the past.’
Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has told department employees to lead by example on plastic waste by boycotting bottled water. Records show other federal departments bought water by the caseload: “More needs to be done within government.”
The Department of Justice has hired consultants at $166,337 to conduct internal “violence risk assessments” among staff. Attorney General David Lametti told the Commons the investigations involved lawyers’ offices in two cities: ‘There was a workplace violence complaint.’
A federal labour arbitrator has overturned the firing of an Air Canada flight attendant for hurtful remarks to an Asian coworker. The words were unpleasant but not worth termination, said the ruling: “You must live in Markham.”
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 Prof. 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. Merely posting an NDP lawn sign was an act of bravura.
There was no “eureka moment”, writes Foster. Local 401 of the United Food & 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, then and now, is 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. “Fuck 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
Cabinet proposes to regulate plastic bags and straws under the same federal law that restricts asbestos, says Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson. “We will be developing the list of products to be banned,” he told reporters yesterday: “There was discussion around plastic bags, for sure, and things like straws. Those are good examples.”
Canada’s trade deficit with China topped a record $50 billion last year, according to data yesterday given to MPs. “Yes, we have seen some drops,” said Steve Verheul, assistant deputy foreign minister: “We cannot turn our back and walk away.”
Three officers of a federal oil and gas regulator including Lead Commissioner Damien Côté have been ordered to sell energy stocks and bonds. Côté yesterday was named in a Compliance Order issued by the Ethics Commissioner: ‘I may order any compliance measure I determine is necessary.’
A federal home equity loan program polled badly in Privy Council research with focus group skeptics calling it a “Band-Aid solution”. Few heard of the CMHC plan, and few liked it once it was explained: “There was low to moderate interest in the idea.”
A plague of bed bugs in federal buildings in Ottawa and Gatineau, Que. has cost a million dollars to date. Contractors were hired to inspect and fumigate thirty-four buildings. At Canada Post headquarters, authorities called in dog teams to search for insects: “Bed bugs are making a comeback.”
A cabinet advisory panel yesterday recommended internet news media register with the government under the Broadcasting Act subject to federal “codes of conduct”. The panel did not explain how the law would be enforced. The CBC would ensure quality in news coverage, advisors said: “The enforcement issue is a different issue.”
Millions in a federal climate change venture went unspent due to cumbersome paperwork, says a Department of Public Safety audit. The program to warn homeowners who live on flood plains expires in March: “Various reasons were provided.”
Federal equity loans for first-time homebuyers saw limited take-up in the first quarter of the program, data show. Cabinet had predicted 100,000 borrowers would apply for loans from CMHC: “The numbers just don’t add up.”
The Commons yesterday ordered a federal investigation of one of Parliament’s costliest programs. A Conservative motion mandating an audit of $186.7 billion in subsidies for roads, bridges and other public works passed by a vote of 166 to 152 over cabinet objections: “What we need is more transparency.”
The Toronto-Dominion Bank faces a $391,730 lawsuit for failing in its “duty of care” to an 81-year old depositor victimized by fraudsters. Lawyers in the case cited the Bank’s own guide describing “red flags” for tellers in monitoring suspicious withdrawals: ‘It seems the Bank’s unstated position is that it owes no duty of care at all.’
