Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

(November 24) - When will working people learn? We constantly receive lessons from the experiences of others, and just as constantly ignore them.

When workers have a chance to join a union, why do they believe the chorus of nay-saying from people who profit from a non-union environment? Maybe they believe the employers who say either of two things: you don’t need a union, we will look after you; or, if you join a union we will shut down and move away. Or maybe they believe the conservative think tanks who say unions served a purpose 50 years ago but aren’t needed any more.

As we saw last week with W. C. Wood, when push comes to shove, employers look after themselves. They will abandon people who loyally punched the time clock week after week, year after year. When it suits their financial balance sheet, they will close down whether there is a union or not.

Unions do not plunge a company into bankruptcy. Poor management does. If anything, during this recession we have seen unions help companies survive.

The main thing unions do – as important and relevant today as it was in the dirty thirties –is protect workers from callous and arbitrary managers. Wages, working conditions and workplace safety are all better in a unionized workplace.

Could a union have protected these workers from the catastrophe of going into receivership? The CAW did for the men and women at GM and Chrysler, but those companies wanted to stay open. The Wood family gave up when they sold out to an American financial holding company that couldn’t have cared less about what happens to families in Guelph.

There is a bigger injustice here, though. Also an awful irony.

My guess is that the Wood workers who bothered to cast votes on election day chose either the Conservatives or the Liberals. These are the parties that passed the law that left workers wages at the bottom of the list of debts to be paid by bankrupt companies. First in line are the secured creditors. The banks, mortgage companies and anyone from whom Woods borrowed money and put up property as collateral.

Workers wages, vacation pay, severance pay and the like are unsecured. They have already earned the money, but they stand at the back of the line when it comes time to collect. The best they can expect is a one-time payout of $3,200, at most, from the federal government’s Wage Earner Protection Program. Most long-service employees are owed a whole bunch more than this.

Compare this to the wage protection fund put in place by the provincial NDP government in the early 1990s. All companies contributed to the fund. In the event of a corporate bankruptcy, workers who were owed back wages and severance pay would be paid from the fund. In full. No $3,200 cap. The government would then pursue the corporation for repayment. The workers and their families did not suffer an additional hardship on top of losing their jobs. The Conservative government of Mike Harris dismantled this fund and threw workers back to the back of the line.

As they contemplate a future without manufacturing jobs, the Wood workers should look at what they could have had and what they do have. Those of them who vote Conservative should know they put themselves on the slippery slope that has led them to where they are. Those who vote Liberal should wonder why the provincial government has done nothing to protect their earnings when their employer went belly-up.

All of them should vow to never make the same mistake again.

(November 17) - A healthy body is a series of interconnected pieces that all depend on each other. As the old song sang, the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. The liver connects to the heart. Feet are joined to the nose, often switching roles. It’s the same with a community. The connectivity becomes obvious when looking at Guelph’s stalled downtown redevelopment.

There were going to be two bookends to the downtown core: city hall to the south and the library to the north. They would be the pillars that hold everything between them together. The poles of a magnet that attracts business and people to St. George’s Square. The yang and the yin that pull us in. There are not enough clichés in the English language to do justice to the wonders we could have beheld.

Lots of people want to see a more pedestrian-friendly downtown. It’s a noble idea that requires a bigger and better transit system. It also needs parking garages where we can leave our cars while walking from one shop to another. Hence the Wilson Street Parkade. Baker Street redevelopment will bring a healthy mix of residences, offices, shops and a library. The city planners calculate that during construction, most of the Baker Street parking lot will be unusable. That’s one of the reasons they want to get Wilson Street done first. Another reason is the redesigned transit hub.

The garage on Wilson is tied, in some minds, to the GO train station that should come to Guelph in a few years. This linkage is a bit tenuous, though. It doesn’t seem wise to plunk the GO station downtown and use up valuable real estate for people to leave their cars while they leave town. If you look at a map of the GO system, most train stations are closer to the edge of town. Parking is right at the station, not a block and a half down the street. The York-Watson area seems a likelier commuter spot. Support for downtown redevelopment does not mean stuffing everything in, whether it fits or not. Parking in the core should be for the people who live, work or shop there.

Not everyone wants downtown to become a car-free and care-free pedestrian heaven. The Downtown Business Association wants to increase the traffic flow along Wyndham Street. They have compared numbers. In September 1993, 12,100 vehicles a day went through the Square. In October 1998, there were 8,300. By April of 2007 the daily total was 5,476.

They point to the traffic lights at the square as the cause of the drop. In 1998, the lights were changed to allow for all-way pedestrian crossings every time they cycled from green to red. This is known as a “pedestrian scramble” crossing. Guelph was well ahead of the curve when it was installed. Toronto set one up on the corner of Yonge and Dundas in 2008. A couple of weeks ago, London opened one in Oxford Circus, the very busy corner of Oxford and Regent Streets. About 32,000 people cross there every hour. Traffic stops every 90 seconds when all lights turn red. The world’s biggest is in Tokyo

Cars driving through town on Wyndham Street don’t put a penny’s worth of business into any of the stores. Pedestrians walking down the street do. Downtown businesses suffer from a lot of complex problems. The scramble in the square should be the least of their worries.

And what was that about the feet and nose switching roles? It happens every flu season when your nose runs and your feet smell.

(November 10) - And it’s one, two, three what are we fighting for? Why are 2,200 fine young Canadian men and women still dodging bullets and land mines in southern Afghanistan?

Last August, Hamid Karzai declared himself the winner of an election that was exposed as fraudulent by United Nations observers. Ballot box stuffing, voter intimidation and corruption were rampant. The results were overturned. In any normal democracy, the candidate who benefited from, and possibly even encouraged and orchestrated, this outrage would be disqualified from future elections. Not there. Karzai was allowed to stand in a run-off election. His only opponent withdrew. The vote was cancelled.

Between the first and second failed elections, six more Canadian soldiers were killed. Two days later, an Afghan police officer shot and killed five British soldiers.

On Remembrance Day 2007, the Canadian death toll in this war was 72. Last year it was 98. This year, 133.

Tomorrow, as we stand for our moment of silence at 11 a. m., think about those 133 families. Parents, wives, children, brothers, and sisters all grieving. For what? To prop up a government that has no legitimacy? To secure a feudal society that prospers on the heroin trade?

Too many of our soldiers have lost their lives in that far-off land. It is time to stop and get out. The best support we can give our troops is to bring them home as quickly as possible.

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The Canadian gun registry is all but dead. That is bad. Even worse is the feeble reasoning that led otherwise intelligent people to oppose it. Twelve were NDP MPs who ought to know better.

One, Charlie Angus, comes from a northern Ontario mining community. With his band The Grievous Angels, and a paper, Northern Miner, he fought strenuously for the safety of hard rock miners. He still does. I spoke to him on the phone a few times when I was at the Workers Health and Safety Centre in Toronto. I met him in 2004 when he came to support Phil Allt’s campaign. I thought he would have what it takes to stand up against the carnage of the gun lobby. I was wrong.

What was the worst of the foolishness? One example: the long gun registry makes criminals of honest hunters and farmers. It doesn’t.

Some farmers say they need rifles and shotguns. Maybe they do. They also need pickup trucks. They don’t object to registering the truck. Why not register the gun?

Another piece of nonsense –and some think they are being very profound when they say it –is that criminals won’t register their guns. Well, duh! No kidding. The second half of this half-thought is that the gun registry won’t stop gun crimes. What a shocking revelation.

Guess what? Laws against bank robbery don’t stop people from robbing banks. Laws against domestic violence don’t stop husbands from shooting wives when that’s where their insecurity takes them.

The gun registry was never intended to stop anything. It was designed, among other things, to let police know if there is a gun in the house when called to a domestic disturbance.

It was poorly managed. That is reason to fix it, not to scrap it. Frank Valeriote, our MP, voted to keep it. Good for him. Eight of his Liberal colleagues, 12 of my fellow New Democrats, and all the Conservatives voted to abolish it. Shame on them.

One tragedy is the erosion of gun control a month before the 20th anniversary of the Montreal massacre. A second tragedy is the triumph of false logic and shallow thinking. That, unfortunately, is the temper of our times.

(November 03) - Not a lot of people have heard of John Gibbon. He died in 1952. During his lifetime he wrote several novels that nobody reads any more and a couple of history books, and he organized a lot of folk festivals. He led an interesting life that might well have eventually faded into the fog, except for one thing.

He wrote a book, in 1938, that had a profound impact on the future development of our country. It was Canadian Mosaic: the Making of a Northern Nation. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I never read it, and probably never will. That doesn’t matter. The concept, and the content, have become so much a part of the Canadian fabric that we all understand what it’s all about. It sets us apart from our neighbour south of the border.

Down there, they have what is known as the melting pot. They assimilate. We recognize the strength that comes from diversity. They want everyone to be the same. We want people to be themselves. People from all over the world have made a home in this country. They each bring their own cultural richness and all of us learn from each of us. Not many other countries value diversity the way we do.

It’s the difference between a stew and a potluck dinner. You can take all the food and throw it into a big pot and come up with something tasty and nourishing. The carrots, potatoes and peas are easy to tell apart, even though they’re in the same bowl. Or you can set several plates on the table and take something from each. It’s just as nourishing, but the taste sensations make the meal much more interesting.

Canadian Mosaic set the basis for our multicultural society. Frank Valeriote wants to shift the emphasis to intercultural. This claims to recognize the differences between cultural groups while somehow bringing them together.

Intercultural stew. Multicultural potluck.

The trouble with the stew? There is usually one ingredient that predominates.

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When I first heard about the Hanlon Creek sod-turning last week, I thought it was not something I would have advised. When you have opponents who thrive on getting their picture in the paper, why hand it to them on a platter? It is what they want.

What should have been a rather mundane photo op for the politicians was bound to turn into a circus. As with most circuses, the clowns hid their faces behind masks and make-up.

There’s more to it, though. The sod turning isolated the LIMITS crew. They like to claim substantial community support. There is no indication of it. They haven’t taken a cue from the anti-Wal-Mart campaign and stood outside grocery stores in fair weather and foul collecting signatures on a petition. Well over 10,000 people signed up against Wal- Mart. Such opposition to the Hanlon development just does not exist.

The sod-turning showed this graphically. It showed the city politicians and staff to be united. It showed the noisy opponents to be few and immature. There are many other environmentalists around town who see what they believe to be flaws in the plan and are working reasonably to fix them. They are not saying, as is LIMITS, that no more ground will be broken.

So kudos to the mayor, councillors and staff for showing they have the vision to move our city forward and the courage to run a gauntlet of goons. Let’s all look forward to the day when we can settle our differences without spitting, cursing and poking sticks in each other’s eyes.