A parable for a modern-day Scrooge

Okay, this is just my opinion, and it's not going to happen, but . . .

 Wouldn't it be nice if people suddenly had great flashes of insight into their behavior and acted upon it? Say somebody who'd made huge piles of money through actions that lost people their jobs.

 Robert Milton, for example. The chair of ACE holdings, Air Canada's parent, has no qualms about trumpeting his ruthlessness in having stripped the airline and other ACE holdings.  Milton said recently: "The parts of the airline were worth more than an airline would ever be."

 So there. Tish-tosh. Laid-off workers, lost homes, fear, uncertainty and dread. Not his problem. He's made a fortune, scooping up $43 million in salary and stock options in 2007, and is in line to receive another $10 million when ACE winds down this year. He's off to live in the U.K. when ACE winds down later this year.

 But, imagine - just imagine - he has a Eureka! moment. Snug in his bed and about to drift off, Milton sees a vision of the long line of former Air Canada employees snaking around the block in front of a food bank. He sees a little boy on crutches with one woman. 

 At that very moment, he suddenly thinks: "Hey, I don't need millions and millions of dollars for myself. I think I'm taking too much. Something is way out of whack here, and I'm going to fix it."

 From the next morning, like a modern-day Scrooge, Robert Milton made his life about giving back. And one day, well in the future,  Air Canada employees would speak with love and respect of their patron saint, Robert Milton. Pilots would stick small portraits of him in the cockpit to give them courage and hope, and Canadian airline passengers, enjoying the best service in the world, would bless the day he joined the Air Canada team.

Pay equity scorecard: Obama, 1; Harper, 0.

Two weeks into the job, and President Barack Obama signs pay equity legislation for federal service workers. Not bad. This new administration seems to frown on discrimination, and paying women less than men for the same job certainly qualifies.

What a coincidence. The Canadian government acted on pay equity legislation in the same week. But what did Prime Minister Stephen Harper do?  He signed off on a budget that promises to introduce legislation that removes the right to go to court over pay inequity and makes the matter of lower pay a matter for collective bargaining with public service unions.  Another swipe at women.

It was doubly disappointing because the Public Service Alliance of Canada worked hard to make its position known to the government. In November, PSAC national president John Gordon met to discuss the issue with John Baird, minister of transport, infrastructure and communities. He then followed up in a letter, obtained by the Decoder, that stresses the importance of levelling the playing field.  He noted the PSAC is pleased the government is "committed to pay equity" - a view he mistakenly got when he met Baird face-to-face. Wrote Gordon:

 "As pay equity is a fundamental human right, it cannot be negotiable. . . Pay equity must not be subject to bargaining table pressure tactics which might result in pay equity obligations being used as a means of extracting concessions or avoiding agreement on wage-related bargaining issues.

 "Pay equity is a systemic remedy to systemic, historical and persistent wage discrimination. The federal government should be a lead employer in implementing equal pay for work that has been empirically demonstrated 'of equal value' - and not rely on the value the market may attribute to the work."

Gordon stressed his willingness to meet again with Baird, concluding that "getting it right is in the interests of all Canadians, including the thousands of federal workers who serve the Canadian public and who deserve to be paid fairly."

Nice idea, but no go. Looks like Baird dropped the letter in File 13.

* * *

When is a right not a right? The federal budget on pay equity.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission oversees regulations that, among other rights, guarantee equal pay for work of equal value for federal or federally-regulated employees. Sounds good, doesn't it? But it's not enforced and yesterday's federal budget took another step to ensure it won't be. It's a reprise of a section of last fall's financial statement - one the government withdrew then. Today, John Gordon, national president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said legislation promised in yesterday's budget would remove a woman's right to go to court to seek redress in cases of wage inequality. Broadening his criticism, he said in a statement: 

 "This budget fails working people and threatens to undermine the public services that Canadians rely on during a financial crisis of this scale. Cutting taxes will do little to create jobs or help unemployed Canadians. Working people expected more of this budget - and we expect more of our federal government."

The budget promises the government will introduce legislation to correct problems with pay equity, then contradicts itself by saying it will leave settlement to the collective bargaining process. That's not pay equity, according to the PSAC. It's pay equity maybe - and in some cases.

The section under structural changes can be found on Page 211 of the budget. It says:

"The existing complaint-based pay equity regime is a lengthy, costly and adversarial process that does not serve employees or employers well.  Legislation to modernize the pay equity regime for federal public sector employees will be introduced. The new regime reflects the Government's commitment to pay equity. It will ensure that the employer and bargaining agents are jointly responsible and accountable for negotiating salaries that are fair and equitable to all employees."

The result, says the PSAC, will be pay equity if specifically negotiated, but not otherwise. Furthermore, the budget puts wage increase caps in place for coming years that makes pay equity even more unattainable. The union has unresolved equity cases going back 20 years and this legislation locks in a final restriction on women. A recent federal task force not only recognized existing rights to pay equity, it recommended a course of action for implementation. The Canadian Labour Congress offers a summary of those recommendations.

The Conservative government (like its Liberal and Conservative predecessors) apparently doesn't believe in either pay equity or the need to enforce its own regulations. 

The PSAC sees pay equity as a human right. To spell it out, men aren't to be paid more than women for the same job. It's disappointing so few voices have been raised on behalf of public sector workers.

A blunter title to this post might have been: women take it in the neck again.

 

  

Obama up close and personal

The editors of American Photo Magazine published great pix of the new prez by White House photographer Pete Souza in their new group blog. Looking for a short and sweet post on budget day, I offer the link to Decoder readers.

Enjoy.

Looks like it's a fun time to be a White House photog.

.

On budget eve, Canadians pessimistic about recovery anytime soon

Canadians are a less-than-optimistic bunch by nature and in this climate of economic gloom, certainly have a less sunny outlook than the Bank of Canada's Mark Carney in their collective sense of how long the misery will last. Recently, Carney predicted that, although job losses will continue, the Canadian economy should begin to bounce back by this fall.

If only, say a majority of Canadians in a poll released on the eve of  tomorrow's budget by the well-respected Nik Nanos. Canadians are experiencing the grim effects of the meltdown first-hand or live in fear they soon will. Everybody knows somebody who has lost a job. In a survey conducted by Nanos Jan. 3-7, those polled said they expert a "severe recession" to last into 2010. Questioned about  options for Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's budget, respondents opted for (in order of preference) a stimulus package for infastructure and public works, personal tax cuts and investment tax incentives for industry. They do not favour money given directly to floundering auto companies.

In case you need it, the poll is confirmation you're not alone in having the midnight sweats about your future and that of your family.

Budget ideas for a smart finance minister

A) What about "Buy Canadian" for government procurement? Recently, Defence Minister Peter MacKay announced a $254-million contract to Navistar International to build 1,300 trucks for the Canadian military. These are right-now jobs, with a 2010 deadline for delivery and they are going out of the country to Navistar's Texas plant, even through the CAW insists Canadian facilities, including Navistar's in Chatham, could handle the work. Liberal caucus economic chair John McCallum bemoans the fact the U.S., among other countries, ensures procurement goes to American states and knows how to push for it.

Defence department officials hemmed and hawed about the sanctity of the bidding process, insisting Minister MacKay had no choice on the Navistar deal. Fine. It's true; there must be a tender process for bids. But there is nothing under procurement rules in the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) that excludes a "Made-in-Canada" policy for national defence. In fact, says trade expert, Scott Sinclair, "there is a strong exemption" that allows it by the national government. (Exemptions for provinces and municipalities are much broader than the federal focus of national defence interests.) Sinclair, a political economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, notes these trucks "should have and could have been built here." Since the untimely demise of the Avro Arrow, Canada's military jet-building capability has been non-existent (a permanent condition?), but as Sinclair notes: "We should be capable of handling trucks." The specific exemption is 1018: 

Article 1018: Exceptions

1. Nothing in this Chapter shall be construed to prevent a Party from taking any action or not disclosing any information which it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests relating to the procurement of arms, ammunition or war materials, or to procurement indispensable for national security or for national defense purposes.

2. Provided that such measures are not applied in a manner that would constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination between Parties where the same conditions prevail or a disguised restriction on trade between the Parties, nothing in this Chapter shall be construed to prevent any Party from adopting or maintaining measures:

   1. necessary to protect public morals, order or safety;

   2. necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health;

   3. necessary to protect intellectual property; or

relating to goods or services of handicapped persons, of philanthropic institutions or of prison labor.  

The Navistar contract is $254 million and it's a drop in the bucket in military spending. That could be a lot of money for Canada, both in jobs and broader effects on the economy.

B)The budget shouldn't offer just infrastructure spending, but public infrastructure spending - and the first place to begin is with public housing. Conditions in public housing in Toronto have been shown to be shameful, with bugs, broken windows, aging elevators and a myriad of problems, including security.  Plus, the shortage of units is so severe there's a 7-year waiting list.

Just think what real money applied immediately could do to repair existing units (where feasible) and build new ones. In Toronto, progressive urban planners advocate blended living, with subsidized units existing side-by-side with full-rent apartments or condos in city complexes. Whatever the model, start building.

 

Obama/Harper websites: you be the judge

The new president opened the White House website yesterday with, among other things, a request for input from citizens in its change link. There's a concept. It's too soon to say whether President Barack Obama will fulfill his promise to run a transparent government, open to the people but this is a savvy start.

We have a different political system, granted, but a search of, for example, the Prime Minister's Office site offers no request for participation - or none that I could see anyway.

Nor did a search of the Conservative Party of Canada's site reveal such a link.  You can join the party though - and send money. The government of Canada website also came up dry, although it does provide helpful telephone numbers to contact departments.

This is not a call to republicanism. But the PMO fortress is going to look mighty old-fashioned next to the White House if Obama actually appears to be listening to Americans.  That can only be a good thing.

P.S. In Canada, it's a sport to see whose website can be the most obtuse and inpenetrable. My current vote goes to Elections Canada.

President Barack Obama: The symbol is half the job

If the new president of the United States does nothing else - which would be a huge stretch - just moving into the White House with his wife, Michelle and daughters Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, signifies a seismic shift in American life and culture.  The ordinary aspect of any family - grandmother moving in, children going to school, the family taking in the farmer's market of a Saturday morning - now showcase an African-American family. (Eliminating, of course, special precautions taken for the first family, but you know what I mean.) Fashionistas will take their lead from Michelle Obama and kids will watch what the Obama children do. Emerging pop culture icons. That is the day-to-day revolution in thinking they bring to American society, just as eons ago, Bill Cosby rocked pop culture by bringing the sitcom foibles of a black family to network TV.

At last, at last, at last.

I spent five years as Washington bureau chief in the 1990s, and another six months or so in a couple of more recent stretches in this decade. Bush Sr./Clinton/Bush Jr. went to, say, Philidelphia, to talk about the problems of cities, while a huge swatch of largely black Washington lay out-of-sight and out-of-mind of successive administrations. (Yes, including Clinton's.) Black kids were being shot a couple of kilometres from the White House and it was as if they didn't exist. Washington remained locked in its historical two-city mode: a small mainly white or diplomatic international set living in the north-west (those who didn't reside in Virginia or Maryland) sitting atop the invisible black population of everyday Washington. True, the demographics are shifting, but the city is still majority black. That large sectors of the city were treated as if invisible helped create conditions of crime.

The Toronto Star has always carried stories about the problems, as well as triumphs and lives of ordinary people, in that other Washington (and cities all over America).  I remember a black community organizer I'd written about in D.C. once asking me if all Canadians thought like me. I said: "Pretty much." That was the correct answer. In writing about what I did, I reflected what Canadians were interested in reading - and it appeared to me (and to him) that content was very different than what Washingtonians could read about - or see - in the American media about their own city. African-Americans were invited to the White House to sing a song, like Joe Williams at Christmas.

That has changed - and will change even more. Fast. Hopefully the message will be absorbed in states still clinging to outmoded concepts. The Obamas won't limit their lives to the north-west quadrant. It's a good bet you'll see this family at places like the Farmer's Market (within the Eastern Market) near Capitol Hill and President Obama doing a lot more scene-setting for  policy ideas in parts of the city ignored in the past. Soon it will be routine - the ordinariness of it all so absolutely revolutionary.

The first American family is an African-American family. Hallelujah!

* * *

Take a look at this. So funny. Jill Biden blurts out on Oprah Monday Obama offered her husband Joe either the vice-presidency or the position of secretary of state. "Well, he did," she says, as Oprah and Joe Biden practically hit the floor laughing. Wonder how Hillary took the news?

Blue Monday: another way to decode winter

Toronto Star photo Even the excitement of tomorrow's  momentous cultural shift in the United States can't quite erase our awareness today is "Blue Monday." According to a formula worked out by lecturer Dr. Cliff Arnaff at Cardiff University, the third Monday in January is the "saddest day of the year," notably for us northern hemisphere types. The weather is freezing, Christmas bills are piling on and resolutions, including to get in shape, are  fading fast. Plus, there's no friggin' light. Winter is no picnic for Canadians who spend the workweek slogging through snow.

Despair not. 

I doubt I will focus much on the weather in this blog, but I'm in a position to tell my fellow Canadians why this dubious day is  a blessing. I spent seven years based in Mexico City, following five years in Washington where winter is negligible for a Canuck. When I first arrived, I saw two seasons in the Mexican capital, dry and sunny and rainy. But even after I learned to differentiate and appreciate the subtle changing of nature - the jacaranda blooming in February or people bundled in woolen layers at positively balmy temperatures - I missed the Canadian seasons, more desperately with each passing year. Most of the time I was on the road in tropical climates, not even tasting the temperature changes Mexico City has to offer. I missed freezing my ears white on the outdoor rink and boasting about it.

This is something we all know but let me remind you. Without a hard winter, there is no joyous, over-the-moon, wonderful excitement of spring. I missed that in Mexico. My garden bloomed all year around (one way or the other) and I missed lining up at garden centres as soon the temperature stays above freezing for two consecutive spring days. I missed that crazy optimism that allows us to plant - against all good advice - before the 24th of May. I missed winter and I missed being at home so I could complain like everybody else about how awful it is.

Like I said: this isn't something you don't know. Dormancy, rebirth, renewal, etc., etc. It's at the heart of mythology and story-telling. But it's true. Spring is coming. The light is already increasing, that late February day when you first really notice it going home from work is almost here and the joy of spring almost upon us. How would we recognize it without all the shovelling?

Tomorrow I will return to the more important topics expected by discerning readers of Political Decoder. Is there one?

Fight all you want, just keep your hockey helmets on

Oh, this makes sense. I see the Ontario Hockey League (OHL) has ruled hockey players involved in fights must keep their helmets on, with chin straps done up, or face misconduct penalties.

Say what?

I'm far from the first hockey fan to point out the lunacy of this approach. What about banning fighting. I mean, for real, with serious  enforcement. I'm tired of hearing all that blather about the game not being the same without the blood-letting. It's the Canadian way, yada, yada.

Didn't we just watch outstanding hockey in the World Juniors without fighting?

* * *

(Today is end-of-the-week, no visuals odds and sods day. Bet you'd figured that out.)

- It's refreshing to see the word "hero" properly applied for a change. It's become a hackneyed term in our society - okay, with the media being  the biggest collective culprit.  Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who eased US Airways flight 1594 into a crash landing on the Hudson River yesterday - without losing any of the 155 souls on board - deserves the term. His co-pilot Jeff Skiles didn't do too badly either. I'd want to see either in the cockpit of a plane I'm on.

- Still reeling from that incident before Christmas when passengers sat in an Air Canada plane on the runway in Vancouver for 12 hours. Correcto,12 hours. It's too early to see what the fallout will be (a class action suit perhaps?), but if you are going to treat people so cavalierly in any country, doncha thinks Canadians would rank pretty high on the "we can get away with it" list? 

Hinterland Who's Who: Canucks are a polite and docile folk (except when playing hockey; see above) who live in northern climes and enjoy square dancing and sugar pie. 

- A website courtesy of my web surfer friend Lynne. Human rights, gender issues, all that jazz. . .

Have a great weekend!

High hopes for Obama presidency on Indigenous rights

It's worth watching over coming months whether the U.S. government under new president Barack Obama will endorse the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.  In 2007, when the UN accepted the document, only four countries — Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand — voted against it.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives appear unlikely to change their position, despite a focus on Canada's refusal in submissions from NGOs to the UN Rights Council in Geneva. 

Australia has indicated a change or heart (although no concrete action) and there's nothing new from New Zealand. However, there are 7 Indigenous lawyers in high-ranking positions on President-elect Obama's transition team (according to a Canadian rights lawyer who works closely with the U.S.) and fingers are crossed in Canada that the new American leader will revisit the issue.

It's everybody's problem when 50,000 York students can't go to classes

Toronto Star Photos

York Student protest.

You can't live in the GTA (and many other places) without being affected by what's happening to York University students who haven't been able to go to class for well over two months.  We all know somebody who is affected by the labour dispute between the administration and 3,340  teaching assistants, contract faculty and graduate assistants. Maybe it's a student, perhaps it's someone in their family. More than that though, when this many (mostly young) lives are in complete limbo and kids are living scared about their futures, it must be seen as a larger societal problem. They have sacrificed financially, they can't make plans, they don't know whether they'll lose their year - or even their degree.

Today is the deadline for applications to universities for next year; it seems apparent York management wasn't overly concerned about the potential of losing students too cautious to apply to York. I have followed this strike through friends and the capable coverage of Toronto Star education reporter Louise Brown and, probably like many others, react to failed negotiations with an attitude of "a pox on both their houses." However, it has been particularly disheartening to see the administration refusing to meet with students (taking questions only at two pre-Christmas senate meetings) in the open way the union (CUPE 3903) has done. Surely such an imperial style will facilitate neither ending the strike nor improving labour relations when it's over.

I hear about the strike at my gym. One of my biggest extravagances is keeping in shape with the help of a terrific trainer, Michael Fong, and I've watched him wait week after week for some sense of what's going to happen with his life. At the beginning of 2009, he and other trainers who go to York thought settlement was only a matter of days away, only to have hopes dashed. Mike is in his 3rd year of the Kinesiology and Health Science program (at a cost of about $4,000, not including books), and I asked him to jot down some of his problems and send them to me. He replied:

"-Not being able to work extra hours because I cannot commit to clients when I don't know when classes will resume, therefore, even with the break I'm maintaining same hours as if in school.
- Worried about writing exams in a more condensed schedule (2 weeks instead of 3 weeks).  This creates a problem when trying to maintain a high G.P.A which is important for admission into graduate school. 
- Summer school may be cancelled.  I was depending on summer school in order to keep up with program requirements, as I work during the school year so I generally carry a lighter course load and make it up in the summer.
- Feel like I've been ripped off because I paid for a full school year and will now be getting fewer classes, less learning material, shortened exam schedule and no money back.  "

He also wrote about others who face difficulties, including:

"- Unable to find jobs during strike since they are unable to tell employer when they will be back in class
- If classes go into summer break they will have difficulty finding summer jobs because most will be taken by the time York students finish school.
- Many students depend on summer jobs to pay for school.
- Some students have lost money that they had spent on plane tickets which were purchased prior to strike.  Tickets were purchased for January but had to be cancelled because they did not know if we would be back in school by then. 
- Some students have lost all motivation to study and keep up with school work and will likely pay for it once school commences again.  They were doing well before the strike but with such a long lay-off it has become easy lose motivation and drive.
- One student I know started a student organization prior to the strike.  She had put in a lot of work in organizing and starting the group only to see much of her hard work go to waste.  She is afraid that once school resumes it will be difficult to get the group re-organized since school will be so chaotic and nobody will have any free time.  She had started the group in order to diversify her resume for law school.
-Students who are graduating this year need their marks submitted in order to apply for graduate school.  Since marks will be submitted late this may affect their chances of  being accepted into graduate school."

This is a miserable economic time, frigid weather saps the will to survive and everybody has problems. But this is the perfect issue for citizens to make their views known to everybody they can think of, including politicians. I don't have an easy answer because I don't want to see a legislated end to a legal strike (which wouldn't apply here anyway), or even a forced vote, but put negotiating teams in a room, lock the door, send in food - and don't let them out until these kids have their lives back.

 

Coalition politics: A messy tale perhaps, but undemocratic?

Toronto Star Photo

The accord signing ceremony

It's obvious now and has been for some time: the coalition is dead, if not on life-support. The idea for Liberals and NDP to govern with support of the Bloc Québécois after a defeat of the Stephan Harper Conservatives may have been a novel plan, but new Grit leader Michael Ignatieff has been clear he's not enthusiastic.

Still, what's been interesting about fallout from last December's accord (aside from the overthrow of Stéphane Dion) has been the ability of the Conservative spin machine to convince Canadians the very idea is illegal and undemocratic.  Call-in shows and blogs overflowed with angry Canadians treating it so. Recently, Tom Flanagan, a University of Calgary political scientist and former Conservative campaign manager, weighed in with a column that argues "only voters have the right to decide on the coalition." He insisted "gross violations of democratic principles would be violated in handing government over to the coalition without getting approval from voters." It was, moreover, "a head spinning violation of democratic norms and majority rule."

The coalition may have been a monumentally stupid idea in its lack of understanding of how voters would react to anything that had to be supported by the separatist Bloc. However, veteran constitutional expert Edward McWhinney insists the coalition idea is "perfectly valid" within the Canadian political system. In an interview, he explained:  "There would be nothing to stop it if the governor-general could be satisfied the parties would be able to form a government and stick together." McWhinney said the problem for any governor-general would be a political, rather than a legal one, in that she/he should be well enough aware of political undercurrents to be sure the measure would be supported by the general population. Otherwise, the gg could end up out of a job.

McWhinney also noted (when asked a wildly speculative question) that were the Harper government to fall over the upcoming budget and Governor-General Michaëlle Jean refuse to dissolve Parliament in favor of a coalition, she would have to be satisfied said coalition could offer a proper budget and keep itself in power for a decent period of time.

Somehow it seems important Canadians understand their own parliamentary system. It allows for such things as a coalition made up of existing MPs to replace the government, assuming certain events have occurred, including the defeat of the government.  To underscore the point, that does not mean the particular coalition in question was a good idea. But it certainly was a legal one.

In case you missed it: Canda's 100 top CEOs averaged a 22 percent pay hike in 2008

That's a record increase, and it's not the only good news for the country's best-paid executives. For the first time, they talled $1 billion in average total earnings. These numbers come in the latest report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.  At that rate, centre research associate Hugh Mackenzie calculates these blessed few pull in the average Canadian wage of $40,237 by 9:04 a.m. on Jan. 2.

I slipped up in not letting readers know at Christmas the Political Decoder would be on holiday until Jan. 12.  Today's post is for that purpose - and to cheer everybody up about how much money they aren't making.