Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

(May 27) - A carpenter once complained that after cutting a board three times it was still too short. That’s the way it is with taxes as well. After cutting them several times, our governments still don’t have enough money to do what they need to do.

We’re getting perilously close to a tipping point.

It's hard to pin down exactly when the tax-cutting mania started. It has been going on at least since the early 1980s. That was when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put their conservative grips on both sides of the Atlantic. It hit Ontario with a vengeance in the mid-nineties when the Harris government was elected. Stephen Harper embraces it with a religious fervour. This is not surprising, since he is a former leader of the National Citizen’s Coalition, a lobby group set up to fight any and all taxation.

Tax cutting is promoted as a magic medicine, the cure for everything that ails us. We hear it all the time. “We are in a recession, so cut taxes.” “The economy is booming, so cut taxes.” No one seems to know any more why we have to do it. We just do.

We have swallowed so much of this fiscal laxative for so long that you would think it should have flushed us out by now. It obviously hasn’t. Harper wants to force feed us more of it.

What good has it done? For the most part, it shifted the suffering. When the Harris government slashed provincial taxes, it downloaded its responsibilities to municipal governments. The road from here to Cambridge used to be provincial highway 24. Now it’s regional road 24, administered by the county. Welfare was a provincial program. Now it’s run by the county. The same with housing. Guelph pays a large share of the county’s costs. Remember how much we paid to renovate the Post Office after the last council decided not to buy it? It’s the same with all the county services used by Guelph residents. Running a city of our size has always been difficult. Tax cut fever makes it more so.

Our city councillors are now grappling with the effects of being trapped at the bottom of a downward spiral. There’s a lot that needs done, but not much money to work with. After setting a list of priorities last January, they now have to take another look. To their credit, they are going about it in a thoughtful, systematic way. They are not looking at life through a rear view mirror and pointing accusatory fingers. It would be easy to do when we all know the city’s problems would be a lot smaller if a few people had been tossed off council in 2003 instead of 2006.

Now that they are having this second look, citizens should get into the process. Let your councillors know what projects you think are important. My guess is that most people would sooner see a new downtown library than a new parking garage. I was at a meeting in the Grange Hills neighbourhood last week and people there desperately want an east side branch library. Those who live south of Kortright are looking for a new emergency service station. It will house an ambulance service, a fire hall, a police station and a community component. There is nothing on the city’s list of priorities that would be considered frivolous. While they all fill different needs, they have one thing in common: they are paid for by taxes.

If we keep cutting, where will the money come from? The tax fighters who started it all might give an honest answer to this. They might say we have almost reached the goal they had in mind all those years ago. It has always been about reducing the role of government in our lives. Create a void and invite the private sector to fill it. If public money isn’t there, private money always will be, but not without a cost. We are very close to this kind of decision on Baker St. Do we want our public services to be publicly owned and controlled or will we abandon them to private interests? Do we want to have a Linamar Fire Hall? A Sleeman Police Station? That’s where we’re going, if we don’t turn around.

One of these years, a political party will campaign on a platform to raise taxes and it will win. Reversing the foolhardy cuts made over the past few decades will become an urgent public policy imperative.

# posted by Alan Pickersgill @ 5:17 PM 0 Comments

(May 13) - Sometimes we learn our lessons too late to profit from them. Such was the case last week when Skyjack let another group of workers go. In any unionized workplace, the company would have been forced to let them go in order of seniority. Skyjack workers don’t have a union, so the rules of negotiated labour relations don’t apply. The laws of the accounting jungle do.

Skyjack isn’t hurting for money. It is one of the more profitable components of the very profitable Linamar empire. A couple of weeks ago, it finalized a deal to buy two American plants from Volvo Motorized Equipment. They make rough terrain fork lift trucks. Last August, Skyjack bought a company called Carelift. It operated in Breslau, also making rough terrain lifting machines called Zoom Booms.

The Volvo work is being brought up to the old ABB plant on Woodlawn Road.

It’s good to see this work flowing north. In recent months, most movable manufacturing jobs have been going in the opposite direction. This corporate success is not translating into increased job security for long service Skyjack workers. Some with as much as ten years’ seniority were tossed out of work last week. It’s not that the company was short of work. It wasn’t. Nor was it because these workers weren’t very good at what they did. They were. They had helped put together a lot of high quality scissor lifts over the years.

Their problem was that after being there for so many years, they were entitled to higher wages, more vacation time, and other little bits and pieces that are normal rewards for long service and loyalty.

Even upper management folk take these sorts of things for granted. The lesson the workers learned last week was that new hires coming in off the street get lower wages, fewer benefits and less vacation. The bean counters were taught this in the first year of their MBA studies.

Last December, about 35 Skyjack workers were similarly laid off without regard to seniority and without enforceable recall rights. The ones who stayed breathed a sigh of relief and thought they kept their jobs because they were better workers. Last week a few of them found out there is more to it than this. Some have grandparents who organized unions in the first half of the last century. They did this because their own experience taught them a fundamental fact of life: workers and their families need to join together to protect themselves against the predatory practices of bean counters. If they do nothing else, effective union stewards force managers to see the world that exists on the other side of the ledger sheet.

A falsehood is repeated so often these days that some people think it is true. It is that unions have become irrelevant. They were needed back in the dirty thirties but not today. Even if everyone else in Guelph believes this to be true, the workers at Skyjack and other Linamar plants should know better. They should know that only a union will negotiate seniority rights for them, enforce health and safety regulations, and bring them a grievance procedure to resolve disputes in an orderly way.

Linamar certainly knows how to look outside for help. It just got almost two million dollars from the provincial government to fund new research into solar power. They recently started making rechargeable cordless lawn mowers. When they got into this game, they joined companies as diverse as MTD Products, Black and Decker and others. All are now rushing to develop a practical solar powered charging system for their batteries.

Linamar is getting help from the provincial government’s environmental and alternative energy development fund. I don’t think anyone would object to this. It’s the sort of assistance the government should provide through their Ministry of Research and Innovation. The company would be foolish not to take advantage of it.

By the same token, the workers have access to the Labour Relations Act. It provides assistance through the Ministry of Labour. They would be foolish not to take advantage of it. Management shouldn’t object, since we all know that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

# posted by Alan Pickersgill @ 7:44 PM 0 Comments